St. Patrick’s Day

Yesterday was St. Patrick’s day, and since Michael has Irish heritage, he grew up celebrating with things like corned beef and cabbage and Irish soda bread.  I don’t have Irish heritage (that I know of), and grew up wearing green on St. Patrick’s day, but hadn’t tasted corned beef until after I met Michael. 

Michael’s mom always makes sure that the kids are well outfitted for the day, with dresses for the girls and other green things for Sim.  And now that I’ve discovered Adopt a Do, I have St. Patrick’s day hairstyles I can use on the girls.  Naomi opted for a ponytail with a bow, but Hannah decided on the clover hairdo:

Just to be clear, there is a video on the website that shows how to put this hairstyle together…I would never have been able to either come up with this hairstyle OR make it work without instructions.

We have been having corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s day for a while now, following the tradition of Michael’s youth.  I haven’t gotten to the soda bread yet…maybe some day.  It never seems to occur to me until dinnertime, which is a bit too late to get started.  We even introduced my parents to corned beef a few years ago when we were visiting them on St. Patrick’s day.  They hadn’t ever had it, but did enjoy it.  I have to admit that I do more of a southern-style cabbage, not the boiled kind, but nobody complains about that. 

Last year, we found a recipe for brining one’s own corned beef, so we decided to try it.  It was so good we did it again this year.  It has a bit more zip to it than what you get at the store, and you can leave the pink salt (sodium nitrate) out, which good, because pregnant women are supposed to avoid nitrates.  (This may count as St. Patrick’s day heresy, but the weird pink color of cooked corned beef always seemed somewhat eerie to me anyway; I don’t miss it at all.)

We have friends whose feast day is St. Patrick’s day, and friends whose birthday is St. Patrick’s day, so we paid a couple of visits, which was fun. 

Michael took the day off, because I had a dental appointment in the morning, and then the whole family went to my OB checkup and got to hear Quinque’s heartbeat (later Sim said it was loud and scary, but he didn’t exhibit signs of fear at the time) and see Quinque on the ultrasound.  He or she even did some waving at us onscreen, which the kids thought was great. 

In the evening, we brought our corned beef and cabbage to the house of some friends and enjoyed our feast with them. 

Also included in our day were schoolwork, gardening, Michael dismantling much of the van and picking up a load of wood that he and a friend had scoped out on craigslist, choir rehearsals, and a trip to the grocery store.  As Michael said at bedtime:  “Busiest day off ever!”