Pins and Princesses: Happy..... Day

So I had pinned all these fabulous St. Patrick's ideas.

Like this one from Meet the Dubiens

Source: meetthedubiens.com via Taryn on Pinterest

And this one from Lisa Storms

Source: lisastorms.typepad.com via Taryn on Pinterest

And these great ideas from Be Fickle:

Source: befickle.blogspot.com via Taryn on Pinterest

REALITY:
The day before St. Pat's, Little Princess had a roller skating birthday party to attend, and when we got home from that, I picked up Big Princess from school dance and helped to load the kids in the cars. Exhaustion set in. On actual St. Patrick's Day, Big Princess had a REALLY early morning softball practice, Little Princess woke up earlier than anticipated.

We had Lucky Charms for breakfast. Oh well, at least the table was festive.

I was determined not to the let opportunity for fun on this gorgeous day slip away.So, after our St. Patrick's breakfast on the fly, and taking Big Princess to mid-day volleyball practice (!) Little Princess and I headed to the yard and helped Daddy by pulling some dandelions and dandelion leaves. We fed the leaves to the guinea pig, grabbed some paper from the art easel, paints, and an empty Girl Scout cookie plastic container, and went back out.

We decided to paint the paper rainbow colors with the dandelions. We mixed colors rather than using the paints from the set.

And what better to stir with than a nearby twig? While we were painting with the flowers, we were visited by some friendly honeybees. While watching them flit from ~~weed~~ flower to flower, we had a great opportunity not to only learn about honey making, but bee "safety". Little Princess could be heard saying over and over "Go away bee. I eat your honey, not help you make it. But thanks for making it!"

This day became a real process over product day. The pictures of the product I took do NO justice to this great activity of color mixing, plant and animal uses, warm sunny days, and fun together. Not even going to include them.

Well, when I went inside to get something to put the paint covered flowers in, Little Princess got creative. I came back outside to this:

Her discovery? "Mommy, when you mix all the colors it makes Hokie Maroon!"

So, we broke out another piece of paper and did some handprint painting. While she was busy with this, I was determined to celebrate SOMETHING from St. Patrick's Day other than sugary cereal. So I did a relief carving (used small cookie cutters to cut out the shape) in a potato, and we used up the rest of the paint stamping with the potato.

I am adding this product, because it completely made my smile. She turned some of the circles into Mike Wazoski's from Monster's Inc. (ever a Disney family) added more dandelion prints, painted with the stirring twigs. This picture epitomizes childhood for me - colorful, fun, happy! She ended the fun with some water play in the bathtub.... :)

Later in the day, showers moved in. At one point, both Princesses were running around the backyard in the rain back and forth to our "building" in the backyard where Daddy was working on his lawnmower. And at the end of the showers, we were given this. It was still sprinkling, but Big Princess insisted on being photographed with the rainbow. Why not?