Designing the best birthday ever, with limited resources!
Hey!! Its been a
while!! I hope you are all ok and coping well with the adjustments in
our lives. What a shock to the system this has all been. Like most
people, my plans have all been scuppered. Within the last 2 weeks I
was supposed to be a guest speaker at women's adventure festival and
then last week was my planned tall ship sailing expedition.
Understandably, neither of these have happened. Both have been
rescheduled for later in the year. Given the horrendous time so many
people are having at the moment, this is a small insignificant price
for me to pay.
This is our 5th
week in lockdown. At home, its me and my two amazing children and a
selection of fur babies. Our days are based around a concoction of
random activities and micro-adventures. School work has been done
(using the word 'done' loosely) and my kids have used this situation
as a time to enhance life skills. Both have cooked meals entirely
from scratch and served up some pretty top notch. They've mastered
'Zoom' and have been able participate in scouting sessions.
We've also had
Dominic's 11th Birthday whilst in lockdown. I was
completely determined to make this birthday the best I could given
the circumstances. With a little bit of help from a couple of his
favourite YouTubers this was achieved (I think). These were Outdoors
Weekly and Jiggin With Jordon. Outdoors Weekly is a lad called Bryce
Nachtwey and he is an American Magnet Fishing. He has 288k
subscribers. Jiggin With Jordon is an American bloke called Brandon
Jordon and his videos are scuba-diving with metal detectors and
looking for treasure. He has 2.29 million subscribers. Both responded
to my messages and offered to record video messages for Dominic.
So what did I plan??
Given that we only had my house to work with, I decided to turn the
entire house into an escape room. This was just the best amount of
fun ever. Every room had a puzzle that both kids had to work together
to complete. Only once they had completed that puzzle, could they
unlock the door to that room and in doing so, they were presented
with a riddle which, when solved, would tell them which room was
next. Their prize for cracking the escape room was an old treasure
map, where they had to find the treasure (a big bag of sweets). The
treasure map was of our garden and I have used teabags to stain some
card to make it look old and battered.
They just loved it and
Dominic could not believe that his two favourite YouTubers had sent
him recorded messages. Some people have since asked me how I managed
to organise that. Its simple, I messaged them (via Instagram and
Facebook) and they both responded. I've always been that person who
will ask, 'if you don't ask, you don't get' and 'what's the worst
they can say?' ringing around my ears!! If anyone wanted to try
making an escape room, most of the ideas I got from doing an online
search.
Later on in the
evening, I had set up Dominic's WhatsApp Birthday Bingo, via a group
video chat, with his friends Tom and Charlie and also his dad and
step-mum. This was just the best fun. They had blocks of 10 general
knowledge questions to answer and then they would be given the name
of an item that they would have to retrieve from around the house.
These included a matching pair of socks, a clothes peg, a hat and a
glass of water filled right up to the very top (extra points for the
fullest glasses). Any deviations from the tasks and forfeits were
issued. I genuinely think, for me, the highlight of the day was
making stepmum put on a blindfold and put lipstick on the kids dad 😆! Charlie was crowned Dominic's WhatsApp Birthday Bingo
winner and his prize was a £5 lego set from Amazon, sent directly to
him – adhering to social distance rules!!
The weather was
glorious that day and we finished off the day with a BBQ and a
firepit. It wasn't the birthday he had planned, but it really was
great fun. I've not seen him belly laugh as much as he did that day.
The cost of the escape room / treasure hunt was a £4 bag of sweets
and the cost of the Dominic's WhatsApp Birthday Bingo was a £5 prize. The memories made = priceless.
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