They're always after me lucky charms

Years ago, long before WCK was born, one of my regular freelance-writing jobs was to write a short magazine column called "With Kids". Every month, I had to write about a fun craft you could do, well, with kids. I have no idea how I got this assignment, considering I knew almost nothing about crafts and even less about kids. Still, every month I would search the Internet and somehow manage to come up with a craft idea, and nobody ever wrote angry letters to the editor because, say, the craft was faulty and exploded on their child or something.

These days, I've forgotten all of the crafts I wrote about -- except one. The Leprechaun Trap. I've carried this craft idea with me in my head for years. When I wrote about this Back In The Day, I thought it would be the GREATEST CRAFT EVER, and I knew I would do it whenever I had a child who was old enough. I guess the idea of lying to my future child really appealed to me. To create a leprechaun trap, you simply decorate a cardboard box and set it out the night before St. Patrick's Day. In the morning, the leprechaun has managed to somehow escape the trap, but he's left some kind of a treat behind. I suppose you could rig it up to collapse on the leprechaun in a dramatic way. I never paid attention in physics, though, so I told WCK the trap would just magically fall over on top of the leprechaun when he walked inside. She believed me. I guess she never paid attention in physics, either.

Of course, we had to put some kind of bait inside the trap to lure the leprechaun. We used Lucky Charms cereal, which I told WCK was leprechaun food. I mean, there is a picture of a leprechaun right on the outside of the box, just like with cat food or dog food. What else would it be?

This morning, our box had magically fallen over. WCK cautiously approached it twice, and then twice ran upstairs and hid in her room, because she wasn't sure if the leprechaun was going to jump out at her or what. Finally, I had to go explain that I'd checked the trap and that he'd escaped, but he'd left behind a tiny St. Patrick's Day snow globe and a bag of gold. Interestingly, the gold pieces looked exactly like Chuck E. Cheese tokens. Do you think Chuck E. Cheese machines accept leprechaun gold? We will have to find out.