"If you're lucky enough to be Irish, you're lucky enough!"

My cute little Irish babes on St. Patrick's Day... you'd NEVER guess I was using my meanest voice AND threatening AND bribing them to smile. To just look with their eyes at the camera. My goodness... Amazing how difficult that apparently is! But they're pretty adorable. Maybe they'll block out the prison guard mom voice and only think in the future, "wow, look how happy and cute we were! what a lucky mother Mom is!" And it's true.

A couple of weeks ago, my parents were very, very brave and kind, and let Erin and I abandon our 5 older children and take Maeve and Aoife to Dallas with Aislinn and little Ciaran, and Tara and little Teresa to go to the... North Texas Irish Festival!!

We stayed overnight Friday, then headed to the festival the next day. We used to go to it when we lived up near Dallas, waaay back when. Meaning when I was about 6-ish to 9-ish. We took Irish dance lessons and would perform at the festival. We were quite cute, of course.

We hit Target on the way up. Spent a little too long there. Unfortunately, we have a little too much fun shopping, and my sisters are super convincing about buying stuff. Darn enablers.

Little T gnawing on a banana. If only her mother would feed her...

All the babies. Ciaran, Maeve, Aoife, and little T. The nine-month olds looked HUGE next to the dinky little one-month olds. Obviously.

Ciaran and Teresa LOVE pacifiers. But only when they can rip them from the mouths of innocent babes. Look at his little Alfalfa curl!

Cute car. Cute dogs waiting at the gas station. Cute old guy in hiked-up shorts clutching a cup of coffee and a newspaper came shuffling out. Not quite what I expected! It was all pretty... cute.

Here we are, at the festival. Aislinn and Ciaran, me and Maeve, Erin and Aoife, and Tara and Teresa. We're standing in front of the little booth for our old Irish dance school. Our teacher, Miss Emily, from 20+ years ago is still around, apparently.

Even the dogs were nice and festive. There were actually TONS of dogs there. I can't remember why...

Erin at her most photogenic ;)

Tara and little T. Right about this time, Tara was starting to feel horrible. Quite horrible. Ooooh, boy, the flu thing she came down with was terrible! More on that later.

I love Irish wolfhounds. How one survives hot Texas I'll never know, poor things, but aren't they cool?

I had to take a pic with the... not knights, but some sort of armor-clad Celtic warriors. Bran was pretty impressed. I will say, there were an awful lot of Scottish themed booths and stuff crowding in on the Irish festival. I mean, haggis?? Blech.

So, it was fun. Highlights:

Staying up till midnight laughing in the hotel room with my sisters,

Eating too much Thai food and numbing our taste buds with a noodle dish that we ordered "Thai spicy." And we loooove spicy...

Accidentally getting sent to a very ghetto area of South Dallas due to a google maps mishap,

Aislinn demonstrating tremendous bladder strength just so we didn't have to stop for an entire 3 hours,

Erin and I getting more and better sleep in our room with our tiny babies than A and T in their room with their bigger ones, haha!,

Tara coming down with a severe case of the flu while driving back to Austin from the festival. Chills, heat flashes, fever...the works. She couldn't finish the drive back to Boerne (she, Erin, and I drove up to Austin from Boerne, and caravaned to Dallas w/Aislinn), so I got to. It was past 11pm when we left Austin. Normally it takes 1-1/2 hours to get to Boerne, but we didn't straggle in till after 1am because we were soooo tired. I drive SLOW when I'm tired. I guess everyone does. Which is good. Also, we had to stop a couple of times for poor sick Tooks. The first time we had to pull over rather suddenly to avoid a puke show in the back seat, and a nice Texas state trooper pulled over to check on us. He was such a good 'ole country boy. I love nice cops. The whole leg back to Boerne was fueled by Reese's Pieces, Sweettarts, and roach stories. Speaking of roaches...

Hahaha! We played an awesome joke on Tara. She has a major roach phobia. Even worse than mine. This is a rather recent development, and she made the mistake of showing me this plastic, roach-shaped thing that totally scared her once. So, being the good sister that I am, I stowed it away for future use. The perfect moment came at the hotel. Aislinn and Erin were in on the plot, I better add. Knowing them, they would claim innocence, but anyone who DOES know them, knows better. Anyway, right before we all went to bed, as Tara was getting up to go brush her teeth, I slipped that sucker right near the pillow where she'd been laying. It stood out brilliantly against the bright white sheet. I gasped and pointed to it. Tara's eyes followed my finger, and the screaming began. Oh, how she screamed! Seriously, I was shocked that no one came to check on her. She is LOUD. It was so hilarious!! And afterwards, the poor thing STILL must not have been thinking clearly, because she gave it BACK to me. Hehehehe... oh, the possibilities...

Anyway, we had a blast. Being Irish is pretty awesome. So is being with my sisters :)