One Red Brick

Another quick post to get something out there while the boy and I get our video/music project off the ground.  I hope to finish a write up of my 40-Day Paleo Experiment and get that out by Monday. We’ll see. I just got news that one or more of my geocaches didn’t survive the winter so I might need to deal with that instead.

A while back I wrote about a scavenger hunt I created for four of the kids in my son’s class. We all had fun and the dads and I discussed what we were going to do next. We discussed a staged “dad-napping” with video clues for the kids on the rescue team, but we never moved on from the “wouldn't it be neat if” stage of the project.

Some time later I was told that one of the kids really wanted to do another scavenger hunt.   I built this brick as part of a mini-quest with the intention of hiding it at their school, but there was no way to not include everyone. It's hard enough to coordinate four kids for something like this, never mind 15. Including only a small group was likely to end in hurt feelings no matter how I thought about it. The school thing was out.    The venue and theme was changed to the church, since three of the four original Mystery Solvers attended (well… highly asynchronously attended) there anyway.

The plan was to have a small black felt bag “appear” in the four kids’ backpacks at school (or somewhere. Each bag had an origami bird with the words TOP SECRET on it, along with wooden cross with the acronym of the church on it. When unfolded, the four birds revealed a message that they could decode using the guide on the back of the badges they won from the first scavenger hunt.

The four encrypted messages each comprised a line of a poem:

Look for a new poster in the place where we break bread.
Then go to the place marked by letters of red.
When you arrive there soon you will see,
A brick sitting there where a brick shouldn't be.

So they would have to work out that they needed to go to the cafeteria at a particular church, look for a poster with red letters (the red letters on the poster spelled “PLAYGROUND”) go to the playground out back, and find the brick. Inside the brick was four packs of Pokémon cards.

All of the props were easy to make (or cheap to buy, in the case of the bags). Infinitely less easy was getting all of the kids together on the same Sunday (the max was three – exactly the wrong number for lots of reasons), so this stuff sat in the garage for months. 

Eventually, I decided to just let the boy find these bags scattered around his room and do the mini-hunt himself as a reward for something or other he did... I can't remember what. All I had to do was place the brick and put up the poster. I made sure the timing was such that no one else would disrupt or discover them. He was happy to get the cards (and the brick), but he was a little bummed he wasn't allowed to tell his friends about the quest.

Hopefully, the dads and I can finally get the dad-napping thing going so we can include everyone by the time the weather warms up. Hmm… Now that I read what I just wrote it looks like I've got some long overdue texts to send out...