St. Patrick's Day

First of all, here is a picture Maddie requested be made available online for a school project.  It's from last November when we went to the Meridian, Idaho Temple open house.  Maddie's paper is about her weird family, complete with a bunch of crazy photos I've uploaded to this blog over the years.  Her teacher should be very entertained.  Or scared?  ("Here's a behind the scenes view of this publicly semi-normal looking family...")

 St. Patrick's Day is always a fun one around here.  Elizabeth herself spent at least an hour making a rainbow trail from both the front and back doors from her gel pens to the kitchen table with the leprechaun traps. 

 When we got up the next morning, all of the jewelry and coins and fake gold the kids had put out were all gathered up in a little hoard by the couch.  The milk was green, and general mischief had taken place.  But the leprechauns had left gold foil wrapped Reese's peanut butter cups for the kids, which was met with general acclaim.  Maddie had specifically asked for no Rolos this year because of her palate expander in her note to the leprechauns. 

Saturday started with a soccer game at 9 am, which we lost.  Our team is too polite, waiting for the other team to open up before going after the soccer ball.  Not the best strategy for winning.  I think the coach was trying to mix things up for whatever reason, and put pretty much everyone in a different part of the field than what they were used to.  Annie and Maddie do a decent job as defenders, but had no clue what to do as forwards.  In fact, we spotted Maddie standing midfield talking to another team member during the game a couple of times.  Um, guys?  There's a game being played....  And we are behind.  I don't know about you, but maybe you should go after the ball?  Just saying.

After the game, I took all of the girls home and Ryan went to meet some guys from church for a game of ultimate Frisbee.  And I started what is usually our standard St. Patrick's Day dinner, but for lunch.  I made leg of lamb, colcannon (mashed potatoes, bacon, onions and cabbage), and carrots.  The Martinelli's apple cider we had is in no way considered Irish, but the kids found it in the pantry and said it was a good time for sparkling cider.  It was a much fancier lunch than I make pretty much ever, but an exception needed to be made.  We needed our holiday meal, but it was stake conference weekend.

Stake conference means Ryan's leadership meeting at 4 pm in Yakima, which blights any plans for dinner at home.  There was an adult session at 7 pm as well, and the stake was asking for double the usual attendance.  This means that we really should go, just because we usually don't.  Although we do go more often than before, with the kids able to babysit themselves and because Ryan is in the bishopric and has to go to the priesthood leadership meeting.  (The unofficial 14th article of faith would be: We believe in meetings, we hope for meetings, we have endured many meetings and hope to be able to endure all meetings.  If there is ever a reason for a meeting, we seek after it.)

I was supposed to drive Tiffany to Yakima to meet our husbands for a double date dinner, and Emma was supposed to babysit her family.  About a half hour before I was to pick up Tiffany, my kids intercepted a call from her asking if all of my kids would want to hang out with her kids for the evening.  With so many eyes and ears interested in the conversation, it seemed churlish to say no.  Even though I was really tempted to.  We don't get back to town until 10 pm, and my kids get so grumpy when they are up late.  But they promised they would get their pjs on and teeth brushed before we picked them up, and would go right to bed, and would be nice the following day.

We met up with our husbands and had Greek food for dinner.  While that gyro sandwich is really tasty, it felt wrong to eat it on St. Patrick's Day.  I was wearing a green skirt, and Ryan had green on his tie, so we felt we were honoring our heritage anyway.  The visiting area Seventy asked all those wearing green in the adult session to stand up.  Then he asked everyone who was not actually Irish from that bunch to sit down.  It was surprising how small the number of people still standing was, but Ryan and I were both still standing.  We both could have pulled out the screen shot from Ancestry.com and show just how much of our DNA admits to being Irish.  I am a whopping 19% Irish, but I digress.

The adult session of stake conference was really good.  I was glad I went.  Elder Michael Murray (the visiting member of the seventy) was a very good speaker.  I do love a speaker with a sense of humor.  He got up near the beginning of the meeting to introduce himself, saying he was giving us all a peek at him, so we'd know whether or not we'd like to stay for the rest of the meeting.  Not that I would have left, but he was a very engaging speaker and kept us chuckling during his introduction of himself.  The topics covered were raising covenant keeping teenagers and how to support teens (a very relevent topic around here), and staying faithful our own journey to the Promised Land (ie., eternal life).

The end of the evening saw us at McDonald's for ice cream with James and Tiffany.  We are clearly in need of more friend time.