Happy St. Patrick's Day!

We did lots of simple yet fun things to celebrate St. Patrick's Day! We stayed home all day - it was a peaceful day, but we stayed very busy. I saw these yummy-looking treats back on Valentine's Day and thought they would be fun to make. I thought the next good opportunity would be St. Patrick's Day, with green sprinkles instead of valentine colors. Caroline enjoyed the dipping and sprinkling!

Pretty!! And so unhealthy. My husband wonders who I am and what I did with his wife. I'm not even going to think any more about what is in that white bark coating or how much saturated fat it has!! Every once in awhile, a non-healthy treat is fun. And we are hosting our moms' group/playgroup this Friday, so we'll be sure to save some of these to share then as a treat for Caroline's upcoming birthday!

I came up with a very simple craft for Caroline to celebrate Saint Patrick. I'm going to post the details here so I can refer to them in the future (and in case anybody wants to use the idea themselves). It could be adapted with any shape - a heart for Valentine's Day, or any other symbol.

I bought a piece of green felt from the craft section and freehanded a shamrock shape on a piece of paper, and then I traced it onto the felt and cut it out:

You can't tell, but I cut small slits around the edges. Then I made a "lacing needle" by taking a half of a pipe cleaner and bending it in half. Then I tied one end of a long piece of yarn to it. Caroline held the "needle" and pushed the folded end through the slits in the shamrock.

She weaved it in and out to lace around the edges. She got it tangled some, but the idea was just for her to practice with lacing. I had to hold the shamrock up for her most of the time and help her find each hole. It would probably work better on something stiff, like cardboard.

After she was done lacing around all the edges, I made some letters with glue on each leaf of the shamrock. Caroline cut up some short strings of yarn and then put them on top of the glue letters.

Here is the back - I tied off the end of the ends of the yarn with pipe cleaners so that the yarn would stay put. I tied one end before Caroline started lacing so she wouldn't pull the yarn all the way through:

Here is the finished product. The letters stand for the three persons of the trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. St. Patrick supposedly used a shamrock when teaching about the trinity. It is one plant with three distinct leaves:

We hung it up on our china cabinet and set out some St. Patrick prayer cards and a card made by Caroline's Gran:

Here's a little Irish girl (well, she's 6.25% Irish as far as I can figure) who doesn't want to wear her shamrocks. This is the best picture I could get of her before she took them off:


Caroline gladly wore them instead: