St. Patrick's Day

Since this has basically been my ode to myself, my mom shamming extravaganza, and in all other ways tooting my horn blog, I will continue it as such.  And I will say this: one thing I am good at is preschool.  I come up with (with the help of Pinterest of course) a lot of fun, educational games to play with Alice.  Though if, we're being honest, I think my more flash-card, direct instruction approach I used with Rex was more effective, but also required a more mean mom, and I didn't like that.  

Moving on.  

For St. Patrick's Day a few years back when I was bored and depressed, I made Rex a leprechaun scavenger hunt, which I now must repeat every year, despite my current lack of boredom and depression.

Patrick (our leprechaun) always leaves a box of Lucky Charms for breakfast with a note.

Then the kids have to complete a series of tasks to get clues to find their treasure (candy).

Here, Alice had to make a rainbow by matching capital and lower case letters.

 This is actually from a few days later.  Alice and I made the game board together.  She told me a sound and I wrote down the letters that made that sound, then we rolled a die and moved that many letters/letter combinations and had to say the letter we landed on.  The winner got a handful of candy.

Then we practiced our fine motor skills and drew a few leprechauns to hold our treasure while we raced there.

 Alice, obviously, had to dress for the occasion.

 Back to St. Patrick's day.  This is an idea I stole from somebody on Pinterest.  She has to match the pennies to the number on each pot of gold and then add them together and choose the correct number.

 Self-explanatory.

 She had the help the leprahan get from the forest to his house by drawing a path around the obstacles.  I made her do it 3 times.

This was my real genius of the day:  

The clues she earned at each station were on the back of paint chips, which she then had to sew together to make a cute little banner.  Man, I'm good at this, I should make a blog about it...

 And then she stuffed herself full of candy.

And we could't  forget Henry because he's pretty cute.

I also really liked Rex's scavenger hunt this year.  Because he is now in kindergarten, I, I mean Patrick, gave him a list of things to do while at school--pick up five pieces of trash, say hi to someone new at recess, give someone a compliment.  After completing each task, he scratched off a clover lottery-style to reveal the location of his treasure.  It was much less time-consuming than Alice's that's for sure, but I forgot to take a picture of it before I sent him off.

Now, I'm done singing my own praises.  If it makes you feel any better, I turn into a complete witch of a mother the night before any holiday as I get so stressed about everything being perfect for such holiday so my kids will love it.  Can't wait for them to finally put the dots together on that one and then mock me with their college roommates for being so mean to them while trying to be nice.  Family, isn't it about...time?