the everyday CRUMBS: St. Patrick's Day 2015

Another St. Patrick's Day has come and gone. This has always been one of my favorite holidays simply because I love any good reason to celebrate and being Irish is a great one. :) It seems like the last few years the excitement of the day has gotten lost between chaotic schedules and crabby kids. I was looking back at my photos from last year and realized we never even took family photos - my favorite part of the whole day! I expect my kids were just as crabby last year as they were this year - I just powered past the crabbiness this time!

Anyway, our annual holiday breakfast has changed over the years, but we've kind of settled into a Lucky Charms routine because it's so easy and it feels like a special treat since I don't usually buy any kind of sugary cereal. Sometime in the night a leprechaun usually sneaks in and leaves a pile of golden coins and mustard (because it's gold and my boys are obsessed with eating mustard). This year the leprechaun could only find giant bags of gold coins, so the boys each took some to school to share with their classes.

We've lived here for three and a half years and I have never seen a rainbow appear in my bedroom until St. Patrick's Day. I thought it was definitely worth taking a picture of. :)

Since it was a special day and they got dressed so easily I let them check their street passes before school. Then we dropped Caden off and Shepard and I proceeded to have a very busy day of errand running. We had a Taco Bell lunch with grandma, stopped to play with Uncle Tyler and all my mom's dogs while she's on vacation, and then I had my final visit with the sleep doctor. My three month CPAP experiment is already over and I decided to give it back. It was a very hard decision, but after all this time I honestly didn't notice any difference whatsoever in how I felt during the day. All it turned out to be is this really stressful and annoying nuisance that woke me up over and over again through the night. Not worth it.

I guess I never took any pictures of dinner, but here are our desserts. We actually had our halfway traditional Irish dinner on Monday with baked chicken, glazed carrots, rainbow potatoes, and soda bread. On Tuesday we simply had shamrock shaped ravioli from Costco. Gotta love an easy dinner! Dessert was sugar cookies for the guys and pistachio cake for me.

It was a VERY crabby afternoon, but I managed to rally everyone for the annual - except for last year - family photo shoot.

I forgot to focus my first batch, but I'm including this picture anyway because it has everyone's best smiles. :)

A week ago Shepard figured out how to cross his eyes and now it's his favorite thing to do. I was a little annoyed to look at all the pictures I took afterward and see that he was crossing his eyes in almost all of them!

In other life updates, since I'm still terrible at writing at all regularly, the biggest news is that we recently rearranged our apartment so I could have my own sewing room. I was starting to go crazy always stepping on legos, constantly needing to spread out while I work, but not having the room to do it. Or at least not the room to do it and keep it out as long as I needed. Greg has offered to switch with me in the past, but I always dismissed the idea. This time I decided it was worth the effort. We're still far from getting settled in, but I think it will eventually work out great. I've also been very busily preparing for a craft fair tomorrow and Saturday, so beyond getting all my stuff IN my new sewing room, nothing is organized or hung up or displayed prettily yet. Greg's new area in the living room is still a total mess of hundreds of cords and cables and whatever other crazy tech things he's collected over the years. It's all quite stressful!!! Hopefully next week we can get it all settled in properly and then I'll post some pictures!