I can post about Carys's EIGHTH birthday!
This is insanity, guys. How have EIGHT years passed since this angelic face was born?!?
She's like fully grown, guys. She makes her own meals if she's hungry. She'll stay home while I take the dog on a walk. She'll walk to her friend's house down the street. I let her wait in the car if I have to run into grab a book on hold from the library (but not too long because nosy people be crazy, yo). She reads basically anything, she's doing math well above her grade level, and she's so smart her teacher is at a loss as to how to improve her testing scores year-over-year (how do you do better than 99th percentile?!). (We'll save my feelings on standardized testing for later.) She's SO empathetic and the insights and caring thoughts she has absolutely blow me away with their compassion. She would give someone the shirt of her back if they needed it. She has a strong sense of justice and what is right and wrong, and is rightfully indignant at any perceived slights. She sometimes totally trolls her sister and goads her into an outburst, but usually she's an incredibly nurturing big sister who is often the only one who can soothe Emmeline's upset feelings. And her creativity? Holy crap. She's one of the most creative children I've ever met, in so many ways. She constantly has a fictional narrative running (while at a store: "Mom, let's pretend like we just moved here from Britian and we have accents and don't know anything about being American!"), she writes and illustrates books, she creates paper dolls, she draws and paints, she dances - name an art, and she does it. She's such a good friend and her teacher told me that her dream classroom would consist of 20 Caryses. She can be so sassy and eye-roll with the best of them, and her ability to stall at bedtime or when I ask her to do something - or straight up pretend she didn't hear me - is unmatched in the world. She's also sometimes a little (ok a lot) dramatic and the smallest injury can lead to her wrapping her hand in an ace bandage for days. Her emotions can be all over the place - but from talking to my friends, that seems to be the norm for the age. She's still very much a mama's girl and hates being away from me for extended periods of time (when her dad and I went camping a couple weeks ago and she stayed with her grandparents, I had to peel her off of me so I could leave), but at the same time she loves to go out with her friends and is fervently planning her first sleepovers. (I just realized - she has serious FOMO. She's fine leaving on her terms but if she thinks I'm doing something without her, the waterworks come. Hmm. Must make note of this for future emotional outbursts.) And, of course, I think she's absolutely beautiful, with beautiful freckles and beautiful dark hazel eyes with beautiful long eyelashes and beautiful hair with tons of body and so tall and strong.
And this brilliant, beautiful kid has been obsessed with secret agents and mysteries for over a year now, so she decided long ago that she wanted a spy/escape room party (literally before we had her last party, she was planning this one...and she's already planning next year's Harry Potter theme!).
I thought about taking a group of kids to an actual escape room, but hesitated for two big reasons - one, I thought it would get pretty expensive, and two, most (all?) of them are designed for adults to solve. We did take Carys to an escape room a few months ago, and she was a big help in solving it and did a lot of work, but there's about no way a group of 7/8 year olds would be able to get themselves out of one without a LOT of help and guidance. And I wanted them to be able to solve it themselves.
So...I decided to make an "escape room" at our house for her party.
I'm going to say right here and right now: creating the "escape room" used up ALL of my brainpower. It was hard! Trying to create a storyline and making sure that certain locks are opened at certain points in the game and trying to make sure it was the appropriate level of difficulty for 8 year olds (hard enough to make them think, but not hard enough that they couldn't solve it)...it seriously sapped my brain. Also, this summer has been weirdly busy and I didn't have the normal amount of planning time that I usually do, so I didn't even start hardcore working on it until about a week before the party (as I frantically ordered stuff of Amazon). So the decor for this party is pretty....low-effort compared to what I usually do (AND I REALIZE MY USUAL STANDARDS ARE ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS BUT I LOVE PARTY PLANNING SO SHUSH).
That said, the girls had an AMAZING time and loved solving the puzzle - and SPOILER ALERT they did "escape" with 7 minutes left. Essentially, we let them know that Carys's cake had been stolen and the evil spies booby-trapped it to explode at the end of the hour. Their mission? Solve the puzzles and save the cake!
One of the first steps I took in planning the party was buying locks and lockable boxes online, as well as gathering up any we already owned. I searched Pinterest for ideas, and got a few, but most of them I came up from escape rooms we've previously done or from spy/code books we own. Once I had all the locks, I sort of matched puzzles to each lock. Then it was a matter of arranging the puzzles within the locked boxes so that the girls were forced to solve the puzzles in a certain order - ensuring that they got the final piece (the code to unlock the cake box) last.
And here are the puzzles they had to solve. First up was a maze, which when completed, gave the 4-digit code to unlock the bike lock that was wrapped around a bag. We did the maze all together as an example so they'd see how to proceed.
Once they unlocked the bag, they saw a bunch of strips of paper with odd symbols on them, and they noticed that taped to the mirror was a ciper key. It didn't take them long to figure out that they had to decode the messages. Each girl got a strip of paper and got to work decoding their portion of the message, and then they figured out that the pieces fit together like a puzzle. And with that, they got their official mission!
(this is where I stopped writing it up and just threw pics...someday I'll come back and finish the writeup)
And this brilliant, beautiful kid has been obsessed with secret agents and mysteries for over a year now, so she decided long ago that she wanted a spy/escape room party (literally before we had her last party, she was planning this one...and she's already planning next year's Harry Potter theme!).
I thought about taking a group of kids to an actual escape room, but hesitated for two big reasons - one, I thought it would get pretty expensive, and two, most (all?) of them are designed for adults to solve. We did take Carys to an escape room a few months ago, and she was a big help in solving it and did a lot of work, but there's about no way a group of 7/8 year olds would be able to get themselves out of one without a LOT of help and guidance. And I wanted them to be able to solve it themselves.
So...I decided to make an "escape room" at our house for her party.
I'm going to say right here and right now: creating the "escape room" used up ALL of my brainpower. It was hard! Trying to create a storyline and making sure that certain locks are opened at certain points in the game and trying to make sure it was the appropriate level of difficulty for 8 year olds (hard enough to make them think, but not hard enough that they couldn't solve it)...it seriously sapped my brain. Also, this summer has been weirdly busy and I didn't have the normal amount of planning time that I usually do, so I didn't even start hardcore working on it until about a week before the party (as I frantically ordered stuff of Amazon). So the decor for this party is pretty....low-effort compared to what I usually do (AND I REALIZE MY USUAL STANDARDS ARE ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS BUT I LOVE PARTY PLANNING SO SHUSH).
That said, the girls had an AMAZING time and loved solving the puzzle - and SPOILER ALERT they did "escape" with 7 minutes left. Essentially, we let them know that Carys's cake had been stolen and the evil spies booby-trapped it to explode at the end of the hour. Their mission? Solve the puzzles and save the cake!
One of the first steps I took in planning the party was buying locks and lockable boxes online, as well as gathering up any we already owned. I searched Pinterest for ideas, and got a few, but most of them I came up from escape rooms we've previously done or from spy/code books we own. Once I had all the locks, I sort of matched puzzles to each lock. Then it was a matter of arranging the puzzles within the locked boxes so that the girls were forced to solve the puzzles in a certain order - ensuring that they got the final piece (the code to unlock the cake box) last.
Clockwise from top left: Ammo box with two combination locks, duffle bag with lock (already owned), "book" with hidden lockbox, plastic chain with alpha lock, metal cash box with lock, plastic tool box with padlock (already owned), small wood chest with padlock (similar here), sliding heart secret box (similar here), and bike lock (already owned; similar here).
And here are the puzzles they had to solve. First up was a maze, which when completed, gave the 4-digit code to unlock the bike lock that was wrapped around a bag. We did the maze all together as an example so they'd see how to proceed.
Once they unlocked the bag, they saw a bunch of strips of paper with odd symbols on them, and they noticed that taped to the mirror was a ciper key. It didn't take them long to figure out that they had to decode the messages. Each girl got a strip of paper and got to work decoding their portion of the message, and then they figured out that the pieces fit together like a puzzle. And with that, they got their official mission!
(this is where I stopped writing it up and just threw pics...someday I'll come back and finish the writeup)
