After some insights shared by friends in response to my Valentine’s Day post, I took a bit of a different approach to St. Patrick’s Day this year. Some low-level planning came together with sheer serendipity, yielding satisfactory results all around. 
The day started out with green puffed oven-baked pancake and smoothie which elicited just the response I’d hoped for from Gavin and Arwen.
On my way to pick the kids up from school, the radio announced that the St. Patrick’s Day parade was about to start. The kids were ecstatic at the prospect of a spontaneous outing. Remembering the Christmas parade we’d missed by showing up 10 minutes late a few years ago, 
I tried to set their expectations for a low-level production. What a pleasant surprise to see such an array of parade participants! Among their favorite acquisitions were green gecko heads featured on mardi gras handed out by none other than the Geico gecko guy. Both kids enjoyed an impromptu toss with a member of the rugby team, and we saw dinosaurs, men on stilts, army tanks, fire engines, 
high school bands, the Statue of Liberty, and many others. I couldn’t have planned anything better.
Before dinner we threw together a quick leprechaun hunt leading to green goodie bags. Then I was off to a Relief Society meeting while Chad cooked up shamrock pancakes. Where, you might ask, was the corned beef and cabbage? 
As part of my new holiday sanity strategy, that was the subject of our Sunday dinner. While the kids liked it (corned beef is now Arwen’s “favorite kind of chicken”), they definitely get more of a kick out of the easier-to-prepare novelty foods on the actual holiday. Lesson learned!
1 comment:
We didn't get as much celebration in as you guys, but we also had corned beef and cabbage for our Sunday dinner (I had a RS mtg on Thurs as well). My kids ate it, but they like the green novelty foods better too.
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