Happy St. Patrick's Day!

We love this holiday at our house! This year, my son has been very excited about Leprechauns. They've been talking a lot about them at school. Their class leprechaun, Lucky, has been leaving little shamrock footprints around the classroom, and creating lots of messes while the students aren't there. At Grandma's house, some milk was left out in a little pitcher, in case the leprechauns were thirsty. In the morning, the milk, poured into Kade's glass, magically turned green! He was convinced that if he drank it, he would be magical just like one of them. Last night, they caused more havoc in Kade's room, knocking down his giant robot.

Kade had a class assignment to create a Leprechaun trap. Here is what we came up with! The three of us made it together, but Kade did a large part of the work, and made all the decisions.

We painted a piece of cardboard green, painted a gold road, and stapled shamrock wire garland around the pathway. The straw ladder leads up to the top of a painted and decorated laundry soap container.

Doesn't it look enticing up there? We wanted to lure the leprechaun to the top of the ladder to see the pot of gold. We put lots of signs around, because as we all know, they never follow the rules!

The cauldron holds a ton of gold
(little rocks that were rolled around in gold paint).

It sits at the back, so the leprechaun has to step onto the disguised trap to get to it, and he'll fall into our little playouse.

Inside, Kade made a very comfy pillow to land on so the leprechaun won't get hurt. The floor is covered in plush blue fleece carpet. The cardboard table holds a little bowl (the dome top of one of those quarter machine ninjas) filled with Lucky Charms cereal. A "TV" on the wall is on for his enjoyment. There is even a cute window, complete with curtains. But how come he can't see outside?

Peek-a-boo! There's Kade, lifting the secret flap on the outside to peer into this tiny playhouse and see if he has caught anything!

We hope we have made this little trap so inviting, the leprechaun won't even want to leave! I am excited to pick up Kade from school in half an hour and see what happened. But if we don't catch any this year, we can always try again next year!

The Venus Flytrap

A few weeks ago, Kade had a school assignment to choose a plant and make a project about it. He chose the Venus Flytrap, of course, because "Mom, it eats MEAT!!"


I love them too, in fact, I used to have one! But it died. I tried to catch some small bugs, but failed, so I fed it little pieces of meat, as a gardener at the nursery I bought it from told me to. However, it seemed to just spit the meat out. Doing research with Kade, I found out why- when a bug gets trapped inside, it wiggles to try and free itself. There are small sensor hairs inside the "mouth", and when the bug wiggles, that tells the plant that it has caught a live animal, not a piece of dirt or something. If what the plant catches does not wiggle, the plant opens and lets whatever it is fall out.


Kade chose to create a diorama of a Venus Flytrap habitat. Did you know they only grow in the wild in North and South Carolina? Pretty amazing! We also found out some other cool facts. Each leaf can only eat three times! After that, it turns black and dies, and new leafs grow. Also, it takes ten days to eat a fly! It also eats ants, spiders, other small bugs, and even tiny frogs!!

I have hundreds of bottlecaps that I use for making magnets. We decided they make the perfect little venus flytraps! Kade painted them green, and I helped him make tiny white hairs that we glued around the edges. I cut out red felt circles and Kade glued them to the inside. I hot glued green craft foam onto pipe cleaners to make the stems.


We had some plastic flies leftover from some Halloween project, so we used some of those in the diorama too! Kade even had the idea to tie invisible thread around one and hang it from the top, so it looks like the fly is hovering over the flowers.


It was a really fun project, although I have to say it was difficult for me to step back and let Kade do most of the work! haha. He wants to get a real Venus Flytrap, now that he has learned so much about them and finds them so interesting. Maybe we'll try again, I'll let you know how it goes, if we do!