Family Night – St. Patrick’s Day

I have to admit, this last family night was literally thrown together at the last minute.  I started not to even post about it, because I felt like such a “flunky”.  But then I had the thought, “No… you need to post.  Moms out there need to know that you can still pull off a successful family fun night, even without a lot of time, effort, or money”.  So… here I am.  Posting. ;-)

We began the evening by playing a little game I called, “The Luck of the Irish”.  While the children were seated quietly at the kitchen table, coloring pictures of rainbows and pots of gold (see below), I went out to my office and began constructing the necessary elements.  I took three green sheets of paper, and quarter-folded them into cards (if you really want to be creative, you could cut them into shamrock shapes, but like I’ve already mentioned… I was working on the fly!).  Inside each card, I wrote, “You’re so lucky!! You get to… (choose what we eat for dinner, choose the game for tonight, choose the movie we watch as a family).  I closed and taped each card, and then I wrote each child’s name on a white slip of paper, and arbitrarily taped one to the outside of each green card.  This way it was truly random, and was literally “the luck of the draw”. 

I took the cards outside and “hid” each one in the little patches of clover growing in our back yard.  (For once, I was glad that KISA hadn’t cut the grass!)  Then took the kids outside to go “clover hunting”.  Each child found his/her card, and brought them back inside to the kitchen table, to “discover their luck”.

Jake chose our dinner:  Cheeseburgers from Checkers  (Absolutely NOT my fave, but it was HIS choice!!)

Emilee chose the game: Monopoly Jr. – Toy Story Edition

Sam chose the movie:  Madagascar 2

Between these events, we also talked about the real meaning behind St. Patrick’s Day, and who St. Patrick actually was.  We used this Veggie Tale episode and activity to guide the discussion.  We also made GREEN MILKSHAKES, following this recipe, and using green food coloring, green sprinkles on top of whipped cream, and green maraschino cherries.  (For mine, I simply substituted the vanilla ice cream for Mint Chocolate Chip).  YUMM YUMM!

It really was a fun night.  The kids had a ball, and I discovered I’m not such a slacker after all!