Domestic Adventures

Emmaline turned seven years old September 15, and we celebrated with an animal adventure party the following Saturday. Given that theme, I wasn’t sure what direction to take it at first, but we finally decided on a safari-based scavenger hunt.

As the guests arrived I informed them that some animals had gone missing and during the party today we were going to have to find them. To start, we needed a Missing poster for each of the eleven missing animals. The table was set with crayons and posters ready for a picture of the animal to be drawn.

Once all the guests arrived and had a chance to work on their posters, we served the pizza, my very favorite party food. Then we moved on to our next job: identifying the tracks of our animals. I googled images of the different animals tracks, printed them and glued them to pieces of construction paper. While the party-goers were eating their pizza, I snuck onto the porch with their posters and lined them up on the floor. The kids had the job of matching the tracks with the correct poster. Once all the matches were made, we flipped over the construction paper tracks to reveal a clue: This is no beach, but you could build a sandcastle here. That sent all the kids running to the sandbox where they found this:

Can you read that? It says, “Use the compass to decode the arrows. The next clue is at the machine that does this: _____ _____ _____.”

The sandbox had three large arrows drawn on the sand that pointed south, east, and west. Emmaline and Micah led the race to the sewing machine where they found this:

Which unscrambled into this:

The kids ran back outside to find a little plastic bird hidden in Emmaline and Micah’s “climbing tree.” They had to sing one song to the bird before I revealed the clue hidden inside it.

The clue inside the bird simply said, “big, blue bucket” and it didn’t take the kids long to find this big blue bucket:

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The instructions here told each child to choose a fish. Written on the underside of each foam fish was a clue. The clue that appeared most often was the correct one. There were 2 wooden houses, 3 gardens, 2 mailboxes, and 4 green wagons.

Here the kids had to dig through this fresh sand for “food packages”. I used little bags of runts candies for this, though it turns out if you shake a bag of runts really hard to get all the sand off, the bag breaks open and sends your runts flying into the grass. Oops. Once everyone had found a prize, I revealed the last clue: “The animals are hiding in a place that would get way too hot if it was turned on.”

Okay, I had a hard time finding a place to hide the prizes that would be easy to access but not easy to see early on, so the prizes were in the oven. I used plain brown lunch bags decorated with copies of the animal tracks and tied with ribbon. Inside each was a toy of one of the missing animals and a good handful of candy.

After that was cake and presents and it was all said and done within two hours, just as planned.

Happy Birthday, my beautiful Emmaline. I love you!