St. Patrick

Today we've had some St. Patrick's Day fun. Of course, I forgot my camera when we had friends over for activities, but here are as few with the finished products!

If you haven't fallen under the spell of Tomie dePaola, I highly encourage this book of his:

But don't just take my word for it. Stephanie over at The Little Stuff of Life gave it rave reviews today as well.

We followed it up with talking about the legend of St. Patrick using the shamrock to illustrate the trinity to the people of Ireland. We then went and made some shamrocks of our own.
And then imitated St. Patrick in taking the good news of God's love for us with a relay race and passing on the 'message'! The little ones just sort of ran around, but the older one's actually enjoyed racing and telling each other of God's love!

Xander wanted to show off the "Good News" baton.
We finished off our morning with some shamrock cookies. (Sorry no pictures. Too yummy!)

Our boys have also enjoyed reading the following books about leprechauns! It's so cute to see them looking about for 'little people'!

Clever Tom and the Leprechaun: An Old Irish Story
The Leprechaun's Gold
Tim O'Toole and the Wee Folk: An Irish Tale 
Seal Maiden: A Celtic Musical - Ahhhhhhhh... a good Irish fairytale. The boys especially like the song about the seal maiden biting the heads off of the wriggly, wriggle eels (You can catch a bit of the song on the Amazon link). As a girl, I would have been mesmerized with the 'love' part of the tale. Boys and girls are VERY different.
For me: How the Irish Saved Civilization  
Next year, if I'm up for feeling more crafty, I might try one of these creative ideas:

• Super cool sensory tub idea for preschoolers. I'm not ruling this out for anytime of year - especially our long hot summers when there is not much opportunity to go outside.
• Paper Leprechaun beard. Sure to be a hit in these parts...
• Adorable felt shamrocks. LOVE, LOVE, LOVE these!
• Shamrock crayons. I love this creative take on re-using crayon bits.
• Yogurt Pretzel Shamrocks. YUM!
• Green Smoothie Popsicles. If my kids will eat pureed spinach pops, I won't just reserve these for St. Patty's day...

All that's left of our fun green day is to head on over to my parents for some Corned Beef and Cabbage. She didn't receive the name "Colene" for nothing. Gotta love my roots! (My Irish grandfather loved the name Keegan -"little fiery one". He knew several Keegan's in his Irish Catholic school growing up...)