Happy St. Paddy's Day!!

No, we don't normally celebrate St. Patrick's Day. In fact, I don't think we've EVER celebrated St. Patrick's Day. But this year it happened to fall on a Monday with no school (I LOOOOOVE Spring Break, by the way) and it turned into the theme for our Family Home Evening. One of John's scout electives is to plan a party, another is to set up an obstacle course, and others specifiy playing different games with your family. Well, I like to combine scouting stuff as much as possible, so we made it all into one night and one activity. PLUS it was our FHE, so it was great.



We went to the local park and set up the obstacle course first. This is what we did. First you had to jump up and hit the GREEN ribbon tied to the tree. See it?







Then you had to grab whichever stuffed animal was yours and toss it into the green paper-chain circle. If you made it in the circle, you got a point.







Then you had to jump over the green "river." (This was originally going to be a rainbow, but we ran out of time and changed it to a river instead.)

Then you had to toss your gold into the pot at the end of the rainbow-turned-river. We used pennies. Everyone had five pennies marked in a different color and you got a point for each penny you landed in the pot. We should've put something soft in the bottom though, because every penny that landed in bounced right back out. I was the only one who got a point - and that was because mine hit the grass and bounced IN!

Ben is always eager to help. :)

Next was the frisbee toss. If you made it past the trash cans, you got five points. Mine didn't go that far, but I think John had pity on me because he decided that was worth "half a point."

Last was throwing a ball and a green plastic leprechaun hat (I'm not sure which toy the hat came from, but it really did look like a leprechaun hat) into a tin can that my mother painted with flowers and a rabbit. It was very Spring-ish.

See the little green hat flying through the air?

We had so much fun with John's obstacle course! Everybody was cheering each other on and having a great time. We totally forgot to total points, which I think was for the best. Everyone got the "prize" anyway: dessert!

Next we had our picnic. I made some of my rolls for the sandwiches. (On a side note, I used wheat flour for 1/3 of the flour, and I was nervous about what that would do to my yummy rolls. They were just as good. Hooray!)

John got to pick the dessert, and he decided he wanted "Monkey Bread." I'd never heard of this until just a few days prior. It was what they had at his last scout activity. So I emailed his leader Nylene and got the recipe. It's incredibly fattening and incredibly good. The recipe follows. :)

So that was our St. Paddy's Day party. A good time was had by all!

When you look at the next picture, you have to imagine the boys laughing and saying "ewwww!"