St. Patrick's Day

Happy St. Patrick's Day to all who read this rambling page! I am not Irish by heritage, but am Irish by injection. That is what I tell everyone who asks, aside from little kids. You see I married a man with an Irish last name, and that is where it comes from. I have always loved St. Pat's, even when I had no reason to celebrate it. My favorite color is kelly green, and always has been. When I worked, at the Day Program for developmentally disabled adults, there was this fundraiser for the company's daycare every year. The day care is closed now, so I have heard, but anyhow, I digress. The day care would use the building that I worked in, and the workers, parents and administrators of the company would pitch in and volunteer their time to cook, serve and cleanup the mess afterwards. We would all solicit donations for a "chinese auction" type of raffle table, and it would be great. The stuff would be set up for a couple of days beforehand, and the "regular" workers would get the opportunity to purchase tickets and place them in buckets to win the attached prize. That made more money than the dinner each year. The whole day program would get involved by decorating for the event, after all there would be people in the building to see what was going on, from the community at large. This, besides Christmas and Halloween was my favorite decorating time of year. THere would be painted shamrocks, leprechans, fields of green and tons of pots of gold and rainbows all around the whole place. Especially outside of my classroom. We would get the participants involved too, they would help cut out paint, glitter, glue and hang the decorations. Many of the residences would come to the dinner too. It was really a great event. We attended once, when Daniel was little, the attending wasn't as much fun as the decorating and set up. It was crowded and noisy, too noisy for the kids! But, my assistants in the classroom would always say, at the beginning of March, "UH OH! It is that time again for Michelle to start to decorate for St. Patrick's day." They knew that all art projects from then on would be dedicated to the wearin' of the green. They would sneak a few Easter projects in there and we would discuss our plan for our annual Easter party with the participants. I, however, never start the Easter decos until after St Pat's. Then we would always recycle some of the deocs to be used again next year! I am sure that many of the things have been reused even now! We would take some of the shamrocks and make clover fields with Easter flowers in them, bunnies hopping thru. It was fun!
Those are some recent memories of ST. PAT'S. I have a few from my high school and Jr high years, of babysitting for my sister and brother in law, but those I will leave for next year!