St Paddy's Day Plans

Unfortunately our plans this year have been scuppered slightly by the fact that the husband won't have the day off. Normally I would get a bit miffed about the fact that somebody else made a pig's ear of their work leaving him to be the one to fix it, but not today.

Because he will have nine straight days off at Easter. Say it with me...

Woo Hoooo.

I'm still going to try and get Toots out to some of the festivities.

We're spoiled for choice this year with Downpatrick starting the St Patrick's Festival on 9 March and running right through to 17 March. I'm hoping to get a day at The Saint Patrick's Centre for some of the organised activities.

The husband will be home for the weekend so on Friday Toots and I will have a day of baking. Soda bread and barmbrack are both on the menu as well as some shillelagh cookies, which are really just sugar cookies cut into rectangles about 1in x 5in, then coated with chocolate icing and finally a little green ribbon tied around the middle and I'm still fiddling with those Guinness St Paddy's cupcakes, but they're not quite right yet.

We will be having our usual Spring barbecue again this year.

We try to have a barbecue about this time every year for the family to get together. Conveniently enough it always seems to be on Mother's Day weekend, which is always very close to my mum's birthday as well.

The men all stand together in the garden merrily cremating burgers and trying to get the kids to eat hotdogs which smell suspiciously like petrol.

The women all stand and cook edible food in the kitchen. If we didn't, trust me we'd go hungry.

The men have a few tins of Guinness and the husband has his Bushmills whiskey. They all invariably fall asleep somewhere.

The women talk for hours for play with the kids outside.

It has always been a great day and I'm really looking forward to it this year.

Do you have any plans for St Patrick's day?

If you do, or even if you don't but still want t join in, JanMary is having a lovely St Patrick's Day Blogging Carnival. She'll have a Mr Linky up on 17 March for everyone to add their posts, but that doesn't mean to say that you can't starting posting about your St Patrick's Day plans now.

Even if you don't have a post, you should head over and take a look on 17 March and read all the great posts.