A St. Patty's Day Birthday

Ok.  Do I remember how to do this? It has been. Quite. Awhile!  Apparently I have been missing this here blog, because I keep thinking "Man, I should post that".  Kind of a crazy thought since it has been almost two years since I have posted anything.

But time to come back.  Right?!  So let me come back with something that fits with March coming up soon.

Last year, my son requested a St. Patrick's Day Birthday Party since his birthday is around St. Patty's Day.  We made it a more "family" type of party and had a true blast.  Kids got fun and games and adults got Irish beer.  Good all around!

As you can see in the pic of my son and daughter, we had hats (from Oriental Trading) and beads to wear.

We did a lot of decorating with rainbows.
 

For food, we ordered pizza but then I also made fruit and veggie rainbows.


We had the kids play a couple of games.  We started with "Gold, Gold, Who's Got the Gold?".  You can read the rules of the game HERE.  Another game was to "Shoot the Shamrocks" with nerf guns.  I had to cut out a lot of shamrocks!  We also had them go on a gold coin hunt.  We hid chocolate gold coins throughout our house with numbers on them.  Then each kid was assigned a number and had to find their numbered coins.  Of course they need a bucket to collect their coins, so I spray painted some tin buckets and created a rainbow handle from pipe cleaners.

For a small additional party favor, I saw the idea to make licorice rainbows with Rolo candies as the pot of gold.  I found it on Pinterest, but this is the original source for the idea.

Finally the cake was the part I was most giddy about!  The outer decorations were ok, but the inside of the cake was the best part!!

 

Just look at those colors in the cake!  Just makes me smile whenever I see how pretty it was!

So since it has been almost a two whole years since I was on here, I should probably fill you all in a bit.  During that time we had a big change to our family...we added a kid!  My daughter, Oliann, was born in December of 2012 and is now 14 months old! Amazing how much can change in two years!

So here is my THREE kids (and final!) last summer:

And here is a bit more updated of the little one.  

Well hopefully I won't be such a stranger around here...but hey, I have three kids now...so now promises! Thanks for checking out my kind of engineering!

No Foolin'...It's April 1st

Happy April 1st!  How did it become April already?  And Easter is just next weekend...simply crazy!  I am ignoring the fact that means it is April Fool's Day this year as I am totally not prepared!  For the last couple of years I have tried to make a silly dinner for the family on or aorund April 1st...not sure it has ever fallen on the actual day just cuz' that is how I roll sometimes.  So since I am ill-prepared this year, I thought I would show you what I did a couple years ago.  I did something last year, but I cannot find the picture of it for the life of me...maybe I actually forgot to take a picture of it which would be absolutely crazy for me! 

Anyway, we had fish sticks with ketchup, peas, and a cupcake for dessert...or did we?!  I think we ate in reverse order and had teh cupcakes first.  They did look like cupcakes with pretty pink frosting, but really they were mini meatloafs with pink mashed potatoes on top!  The fish sticks were the vanilla wafer cookies coated in peanut butter and rolled in crushed up corn flakes and the peas were just green Laffy Taffy.  Then the ketchup was some strawberry jam whipped up to make it smoother.  All of the recipes for these can be found at Family Fun.  I will say that my son was a little nervous to eat everything because while it did look like the food it was suppose to look like it was also a little off.  I think the funniest was watching him take a big bite of cupcake and quickly find out it wasn't cupcake at all!


So while I may not make it to have any fun foods this year (although I have always been late in the past...I could still squeeze it in), I hope you enjoyed the look at what I have done.  Thanks for checking out my kind of engineering!