St. Patrick's Day

St. Patricks Day has arrived.  We had a lot of fun this year learning about rainbows in relation to leprechauns and such things.  The girls each made one of these mobiles.  We stuffed paper clouds with shredded paper.  Then we learned what order the colors of the rainbow are and made 6 circles.  We glued them and then cut it in half making two rainbows.  We turned it in a mobile.  We still have them hanging.We ofcourse made a trap to see if we could catch a leprechaun.  I suggested an etable trap and they loved the idea thinking we could catch one and then eat the trap.  Its a win win situation.  We decided to do a rainbow cake.  My colors aren't as good as I've seen, but it was fun.  We used a bunbt pan so there would be a hole in the middle.

We make ladder out of pretzels and molding candy that I had leftover from Savannah's party.  Leprechauns like nature things so we thought pretzels were best for that look. 

We placed pretzels across the top so we could cover the top with something to lure the leprechaun.  The girls got to use my cake decorating stuff with my new grass tip I got for christmas. 

This is the finished product.  Wooden ladder made of preztels, signs that represent things that leprechauns like (a hat, clover, etc), green in coloring, gold, and the rainbow coloring of the cake. 

This is what we found St. Patricks day morning.  If you look closely inside the cake you can see a little green shoe that got stuck in the frosting.  Unfortunetly we didn't think about the leprechaun being able to eat his way out of the cake.  Below is the hole he got out of.  Oh well, we got to enjoy eating it anyway.

The above is what the cake looked like when we cut into it.  Not to bad for a first time.  Below is the girls checking things out.

We also had some activities through out the day.  We made rain sticks because you need rain to make a rainbow.  They were made out of pom poms and rice.  Then we danced to some scotish music and made rain sounds with the sticks. 

We graphed out a bag of skittles.  I asked them different questions like which has the most, the least, what order do they go in and what did they notice.

These are the clues the leprechaun made to lead us to our treasure.  We had until midnight to find it and then the leprechauns would get it back.  Besides gold they left us squirt guns, bubbles, necklaces, and these green sticky hands.  The girls loved those the most, but they continue to enjoy the guns and bubbles.

This is a game we played.  Its called don't eat pete but we called it don't eat lucky.  It had a board of lucky pictures with a piece of candy on each one.  Someone leaves the room and the group picks which picture will be lucky.  Then the person comes back.  They pick a picture.  If its not the one that was picked they get to eat the candy and pick again.  When they pick the right one the group says Don't eat Lucky.  Then its someone elses turn.  The girls loved this as they got to eat lots of candy.  We also played a memory game.

Here are the girls at the park with their squirt guns and bubbles.

These are some of the crafts we made during the week.  The Ireland flag.  The gold is suppose to be orange but I didn't have any so we used yellow.  The clover Savannah did in Preschool.  The leprechaun face was fun.  The girls colored, cut, glued together, and curled the paper and glued it on too.  They wanted to make sure their was enough curls for him to have bangs.  Savannah glue her curls on differently then Leila. Can you tell?   I love it when they want to do it the way they want and not exactly the same as each other.   Leila also thought the clovers would make a good mouth.  Colette's is the last picture. 

Valentines Day

Since Valentines Day was during Colette's stay in the hospital, we celebrated a week later.  Only some of our traditions were kept this time, but the girls were still excited.  It ended up being some special family time eating cookies and reading our new stories and we remembered the great blessing of having all of us home and together.  I make them their favorite cookies and we give them a new book.  Dale fell asleep on the couch during the night, so Savannah is trying to entice him awake with his stash of cookies.  The bottom picture is the girls' books and cookies.