The new St. Patrick's day

For those of you who don't know, St. Louis loves any holiday, especially holiday's that involve beer. We have 2 main parades for St. Patrick's day. One, downtown usually the saturday before March 17th, and one the day of in the Irish area called Dogtown. This year they fell one in the same because the 17th was a saturday. The downtown parade is more kid friendly with big floats, but still lots of beer. The Dogtown parade is smaller, with more marching bands and the clans march, and still lots of beer. Even when St. Patricks day falls during the week, so many people skip work to come partake in the festivities. My mother was in town last year (we were wedding planning) and she could not believe the amount of cars on my street (we are 2 miles from the parade) and the people stumbling back to them later in the day. I have always loved St. Patrick's day (being that Mackey is Irish and all)....but I loved a reason to start with mimosas and switch to beer by 9am, wear green, etc. I have had so many fun times down in dogtown. 3 years ago I even flushed my blackberry in the toilet at Nick's pub...the upstairs VIP one (yes we had VIP passes to the bar upstairs closed off to the general public.)

How times have changed......this year we spent St. Patrick's day at Peyton's championship basketball game. It was a great game too. He scored 5 of the 20 points. Their team has gone undefeated all year and they won the league play. However, the game went into 2 overtimes and they had a heartbreaking loss in the 2nd overtime. The refs were terrible and made some very bad calls. It is a good thing I don't understand all the rules because I am sure I would be the mom yelling all the time. We then thought we'd be able to take the boat out, but mother nature had other plans. Rain, lots and lots of rain, thunder, and lightning. So in true Irish fashion, we ordered pizza, ate popcorn, watched the Blues clench a play off spot, baked a strawberry cake and now it is bed time. No green beer for me today....hey, I had enough calories without adding the empty ones.