New Traditions Mixed in From my Old Traditions

Happy St. Patty's Day! 🍀 It's the last official day of Spring Break and we sure enjoyed it. 

We started a new tradition this year that the kids really enjoyed. Growing up near my cousins we would always go over to their house on St. Patrick's Day for a leprechaun scavenger hunt. My aunt had drawn up leprechaun drawings and hid them throughout the house. We would find them and hand them over to her in exchange for chocolate gold coins. It was always really fun. My cousin Allen has taken his childhood tradition and turned into an official game. It comes with a guidebook with backstories and field notes on different leprechaun clans. It's pretty cool he did that. He just made it this year and is hoping to make it widespread. He sent us a free copy for my family and I was surprised at his generosity because I was planning on buying one myself. Each of the clans' field notes gave clues about their likely hiding spots which Addie really loved that concept. I told the kids yesterday about the game yesterday but today they got to see it for the first time. I hid the leprechauns throughout the entire house and gave the kids chocolate covered coins in exchange for each card they found. It brought memories of my own childhood back even though it was slightly different. The kids then all took turns hiding it for each other to find.

Something else from my childhood that we incorporated this year was watching the movie 'The Luck of the Irish'. It was always on the Disney Channel as a kid and I looked forward to it every year. Mostly because I had a huge crush on the main character. It was fun to introduce the movie to the kids this year though. It's fun to have most of the kids be old enough to sit through and understand these more big kid movies. 

Quinn seemed to have a fever for most of the day. Hopefully she feels better after a good night's rest.

I thought we were going to get off easy this year as far as leprechaun traps go. We had finished a Lucky Charms cereal box and I saw that there was a ready to go trap on the backside of the box. We had set it up last night and then this morning they found that the cereal had been eaten but the box was to the side where you could see a possible exit that a leprechaun might have used to escape. I thought this trap attempt would be good enough for our kiddos to accept this year. I was wrong. In fact it got their creative juices flowing and they proved me that they could go all out and make a better one. They set up intricate traps and even worked together to get it the way they wanted it to. Danny tried telling them that they were too late because they probably weren't going to return to our house and that we should just try next year but the kids insisted that it was still St. Patrick's Day until 11:59 tonight and they worked every last detail until we forced them go to go bed. Addie even remembered how one came to our house in Utah after she went to bed last year. I love traditions but some of these can be hard to keep up with haha. Danny made it clear he wants no part in this so I guess I need to somehow set these off while making them believable. Happy St. Patrick's Day! And kids I hope you appreciate these efforts when you look back on your childhood. 😊

Kid Traps

I'll be honest, I had Hudson explain to me his trap at least three times and I still don't understand how it works. That's okay. It's probably genius and if I was six years old it would be a no brainer to me.

RyleeQuinn

My feeble attempt at making it look like something happened to their traps in the middle of the night.