Celebrating in Style: St. Patty's Day and April Fools

Continuing our Catch-Up...

Thanks to NomiAnn's smart shopping, we celebrated St. Patty's Day in style this year.  We tried to take some greenish photos, but green eyes are hard to keep open when the sun is so bright.

Trying again with a bit more shade.  Do you like Talia's roller blades?  She loves them and spends many of her sunny afternoons cruising around our driveway.

NomiAnn and Papa Kay joined us for our traditional Irish meal of corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes.  Also on the menu: green beans, green scones, green Jello, and green lemonade.

 The men at both ends of the table have awfully green mustaches!

As you can see, we enjoyed our festivities.  St. Patty's Day remained at the top of the meal list until...

April Fools!  Callie (and Eila) came all the way from Seattle to celebrate the tom-foolery with us.   So fun!   Callie's blog explanation is way better than anything I have energy to type, so I'll just summarize.

Since the kids have become pretty suspicious of our meal fare on April 1st, we surprised them by jumping the gun and breaking out our April Fools Day meal on March 31st.  For dinner we served a chef salad.  Little did they suspect what was coming for "dessert."

Behold, our April Fools Pizza cake, baked in a bundt.  (A bundt?  Followed by guffaws and extensive quotations from "My Big Fat Greek Wedding.")

Frosted in Mozzarella.  All things considered, this worked out way better than anticipated.

Our next dessert was a VW bug shaped like Callie's car, Sapphyre.

Since Papa K's birthday was only a few days away, we let him do the honors of cutting into the cake.  In all actuality, the "cake" was a balloon taped onto a cereal box and generously frosted with Cool Whip.  The VW bug idea was a desperate last minute attempt to salvage what seemed like a total flop.  In the end, it turned out pretty cute.  The kids were definitely fooled and surprised as the cake slowly deflated with a "pfft."  We'd hoped for a dramatic pop, but apparently frozen balloons don't do that.

Here's Talia, trying to figure out why the cake is shrinking.


Jason looks on with amazement at the Andrus sisters' absurd antics.

Our really real dessert consisted of Oreo brownies.  In true two-year old style, Annika got the brownies everywhere.

Guess the joke was on us!