Happy St. Patrick's Day!!!

I'm not quite sure why, but I just love St. Pattie's Day. Being the faithful Mormon girl that I am, it's not like I like it for the mass consumption of adult beverages. My house isn't covered in green shamrock decorations, in fact I don't own a single one. I don't even have a ton of Irish heritage. However, I still love it. It's just fun!

We all woke up this morning and made sure to put on our green, so that we wouldn't become victims of tiny, leprechaun pinches. After Maryn came home from school, Justin and the girls did an Irish jig in the kitchen before lunch. And I gave Justin a funny card. But other than that, it was a pretty low key St. Pattie's Day.

That was until right before the girl's woke up from their nap. Justin was down in the basement and swore he saw a leprechaun sneaking around! :) So when the girls woke up and while I was working on dinner, he took them down to the basement for a leprechaun hunt. Unfortunately though, they didn't find him. He was just too quick! So we figured our little Irish visitor had sneaked out of the house while we weren't looking.

While I was waiting for my chicken rolls to come out of the oven, I sat down on the couch with the girls for a minute. When we went back into the kitchen, the cheesy sauce I had made for the top of the chicken rolls had turned GREEN! The girls could not believe it! Now we knew the leprechaun was still in the house! Apparently the broccoli I had made to represent our Irish green was not good enough. That sneaky little guy just had to play a trick on us!

After the girls discovered the green, cheesy sauce tasted just like my yellow, cheesy sauce, they gobbled it up!

Well... almost! Maryn took an hour to eat dinner because she would NOT STOP talking about leprechauns! How high can they jump? Why do they have red hair? Where are they from? How big are they? Do they have little pinches, since they have little fingers? How does their magic that turns things green work? Why do they like to play tricks? How come they're so fast? And on and on and on! We decided if Daddy HAD seen a leprechaun in the basement, it was likely that it snuck into Uncle Kevin's suitcase the last time he was in Dublin and hitched a ride to the States. That was the only way Maryn could figure why there would be a leprechaun in GEORGIA! While Maryn continued to chew at a snails pace, Brynna helped me clear the table. When Maryn finally finished, I had her clear the placemats. As she was doing so, something fell to the floor...

What was this? Brynna picked it up and Daddy read it...

The girls squealed and were off! The clues sent them all over the house in search of O'Malley the Leprechaun's stash of gold!

Finally it led them into Justin's and my bedroom, where they quickly cased the room before finding the jackpot!

It was hiding under the bed! Maryn said that was the perfect hiding place for a leprechaun, since they're so little.

Daddy read it to them...

...and this is what it said!

The kids loved it!
(No we're not mailing Maryn. She got that sticker at the Post Office earlier in the day!)

After the thrill of the hunt, we decide to take it easy and eat some Rice Krispy Treats I had made earlier in the day for Family Home Evening. It was then that we discovered O'Malley had one more practical joke to play on us before he left to go back to the other end of the rainbow!

We hope all of you had a fun and mischievous St. Pattie's Day too!

Lots of Love!
Justin, Sarah, Maryn, and Brynna