Can you catch a leprechaun?

Oh yeah, I was going to post St. Patrick's Day pictures. I forgot.

Growing up we did not celebrate St. Patrick's Day. We are not Irish. Or maybe we are. Yeah, I think we actually are, a little bit. But whatever, I am so many things that I truly don't identify with any of them. So I grew up using my green eyes as an escape from pinching fingers as a child and never gave St. Patrick's Day another thought.

But Alyssa has made it a holiday in our home. She sets leprechaun traps every year, on her own. The first year she didn't catch anything and there were no signs of leprechaun activity. She was disappointed, but the next year she set up another trap and although she didn't catch anything she did have gold candy and a note from a leprechaun. Did you know I can speak leprechaun? I can, he writes in wingdings font and only I can read it.

One year he left gold cough drops (werther's hard candy) because Alyssa had a cough and Walgreens was out of gold coins that year. This year Alyssa was working quietly on her trap on the 16th. This year she went with a glue trap approach. She glued down gold and coins and then made a maze of sticky tape and glue for the leprechaun to get stuck in. I walked by her, hard at work, and thought that I should really play along at least a little bit. I saw a cute trap on Family Fun's website and we had lots of fun making a trap together, with Alex too. We set out both traps to double our chances this year.

We tested our trap and found that construction paper was too strong to reveal our trap door.

Tissue paper sent our little crash test dummy tumbling. The kids also wanted to leave some oats in the container to act as quicksand and make it harder for the leprechaun to get out. Alyssa, the leprechaun rights activist, did have to run tests to make sure that the quicksand would not be too deep, because she did not want to be responsible for suffocating a leprechaun.

We covered our tissue paper with some sequins leaves and shiny gold bells (that was the only gold we had on hand) to lure the leprechauns.

Our traps and trap makers

We did have a little bit of a ladder dispute. Alyssa made the green and blue ladder and Alex was not happy with her craftsmanship. He was trying to explain to her, using the toy crash test dummy, that her ladder would not work. He is very particular about his building. Sometimes he even draws blueprints, although he calls them in-scrections (instructions/directions fused together...CUTE!) He decided that her ladder could help the leprechauns get up on the shelf, but that his needed to be the one up against the trap. This kid is remarkable. He builds all day long. He even builds words out of lincoln logs and tinker toys. Today I also found him drawing the underside of his cars. When I asked why he was doing this, he told me he was doing it to understand how they work. I shouldn't dare post this because my dad already has a big head about Alex looking like him, so once he finds out that Alex IS him, we will never hear the end of it.

Here is Alex's ladder, and Alyssa's sign.

Here is what we found in the morning. As soon as Alyssa saw spilled oatmeal she knew that they escaped. But we did get a letter and some loot.

And then Alyssa went back to work, making her trap stickier and adding more bling to attract the leprechauns. Unfortuantely, I think leprechauns go back to Ireland on the 17th and we did not see any more signs of intruders.

Here are my three little mischief makers. Alex's favorite color is green, but Alyssa only has one green shirt, and Chloe had NOTHING so she is borrowing Alex's green sweater. Doesn't Chloe look older than she should in this picture?

Alyssa also suggested a St. Patrick's Day feast. She wanted spinach soup, and green bread. Alex wanted green jello and we were planning on rainbow cupcakes but opted for a rainbow cake when we found ourselves without cupcake liners.

The girls made the cake.

Here it is before it hit the oven.

Alex made the jello

Ta-da!

And here is our "feast"

And we even ate on green dishes. The girls had pink cups though, so I will only show you Alex.

And next year we are going to go down to Chicago and see the river dyed green. I say that every year and then forget. Hope you all had a happy St. Patrick's Day. I am glad Alyssa roped us in to adding this holiday to our repertoire. We could always use another reason to play!