St. Patrick's Day

I would be more into the whole St. Patrick's day thing if anyone in my family (besides me) liked corned beef and cabbage.  But they don't.  Plus, I read somewhere that corned beef isn't really even that Irish; only the Irish immigrants in New York made it kinda popular.

Anyways.

But I am into shaking things up a little now and then, and I'm also really into my gel food coloring, which works like magic.  So I used some of it in our oatmeal this morning.

Okay, at second glance it looks more like an April Fool's joke rather than a St. Patrick's Day celebration.  Whatever.  We all got a kick out of it.  (Well, not Josh.  He threw a huge fit and refused to eat it and generally made everyone's morning miserable.  I pretty much booted him out the door when the bus came.)

For dinner I made little individual shepherd's pies that were so yummy and cute!  (Not cute enough to remember to take a picture of them.) Lance and I ate them, while the kids turned their noses up at them and ate applesauce and bread and jam.

The bread, if I do say so myself, was pretty awesomesauce.

Pinterest is awash with rainbow bread recipes, but ain't nobody got time for that around here.  (It was a two-color bread busy day.)

This evening we had one of the most anticipated Family Home Evenings of the year: emergency preparedness.  I don't know why, but the kids always get a huge kick out of it.  We had fire and tornado drills and talked about what to do in different emergency scenarios.  I also talked about what to do in case of an emergency at school; I didn't want to come out and be straight-forward about school shootings because Josh is pretty sensitive to things like that and I didn't want to freak anyone out.  So we talked about always listening to the teacher and if she says hide then you hide in the best place possible away from the door and you stay as still and as quiet as possible.  The boys surprised me by telling me that they have lots of "lock-down" drills and they knew what to do.  I wonder if they talk specifically about shootings during these drills?  This both reassures and disturbs me; I'm glad they're prepared, but sad that they have to have drills for that sort of thing.

For dessert we were supposed to have Mint Chip Ice Cream Brownie Squares, but, again, it was a busy two-colored bread kind of day, so they weren't all assembled and beautiful.  The children did not care and gobbled them up, quick as you please.

Spencer's getting so big.  Seriously, child, quit with the getting older.

Cole was SUPER HAPPY about the dessert.  Plus, he loves getting his picture taken.  (Looks are so deceiving - this kid was something of a monster today.  I wish I could convince myself that this is just a phase, but I'm pretty convinced he just has a tough, uber-stubborn, super-defiant personality.  Oy.)  Highlights of the day included him and Tess flooding the bathroom - again - and him getting ahold of my perfume and spraying a ton of it.  Silver lining: my bathroom smells fantastic.  (And probably will for weeks.)

This one is putting me in Pooping Purgatory.  We'll just leave it at that.

And this one refused to have his picture taken.  Perhaps he's a leprechaun?  Or maybe just a punk.  (My money is on the punk.)