I'd been trying to think of a mini-version of The Amazing Easter that I could do with Jessey, but we would lose way too much time traveling. So I decided to do Minute to Win It games instead. My mom was planning an Easter egg hunt for all of the kids, and she had a pretty cool activity planned for Jessey, too. I spent a couple of hours watching Minute to Win It Blueprint videos on YouTube, looking for ones I thought would be fun and that I could easily setup and find the supplies for. I took notes and went shopping, and had a bag all packed for the morning.
My mom and I had talked about where we would do the Easter egg hunt. Parks would be too crowded, plus it had to be nearby to cut down on travel time. Then I remembered this doctor office Jessey used to go to when he was a little kid, right across the street from the park where he works now. We would be nearby, we'd likely be the only ones there, we'd have tons of space, and we'd be shielded from the street by trees so we wouldn't attract any attention. It turned out to be the perfect place!
Don't mind my mom's commentary :)
Once the girls had found all of their eggs (C found more than the other two combined!), they sat down to count their candies and cash. Jessey had slips of paper in his eggs, though, and in order to complete his hunt, my mom had made up a big gameboard for him. The slips of paper had random numbers on them and the board had clues for weird trivia facts (like how many squares were on a Monopoly board, or how many years between the Olympics held in Los Angeles). He had to match up the number that was the correct answer to each question. It took him quite a while to get them all right, but eventually he figured them all out.
I thought for sure I had some video of them doing the Minute to Win It tasks, but I can't find them now. We did the empty-the-tissue-box-with-one-had (Hanky Panky), and Jessey beat all of his sisters, although they had a ridiculously fun time making a big mess. We did the get-the-ping-pong-balls-out-of-the-tissue-box-by-shaking-all-around (Junk in the Trunk) that K demonstrates in the video below and Jessey did with no problem at all. We did the get-the-pennies-out-of-the-panty-hose-legs (Penny Hose) which Jessey completed in a matter of seconds and I figured I must have done wrong somehow, and the move-the-Oreo-from-your-forehead-to-your-mouth-using-only-your-face-muscles (Face the Cookie) which resulted in a bunch of Oreo cookies all over the ground and no winners at all. Jessey did the balance-the-half-empty-soda-can-on-its-diagonal-side (Tipsy) and was surprisingly good at it, although drinking the root beer from the can proved to be the biggest challenge and he ended up having to pour it in the planter instead to save his stomach. He tried the split-M&Ms-by-color (Separation Anxiety) but failed, and the bounce-the-ping-pong-balls-and-stick-them-to-lint-rollers (Stick to It) was a bust because the lint rollers were nowhere near sticky enough to catch the ping-pong balls. We half-tried a few more, but they're a little harder to setup and ensure accuracy of on an asphalt parking lot that is full of little twigs and dead leaves.
Eventually, we ran out of time and had to take Jessey across the street to work. I made sure to give him his well-earned Easter basket so he could look through it for a few minutes before he left, and then we said goodbye until dinner. We had planned to visit our traditional Sunday lunch spot at Boston Market, for the sake of A who does not handle it well if we go anywhere else. After lunch, we'd planned to finish The Amazing Easter, completing the final two legs and then giving the girls their Easter baskets.
Leg 10 involved a series of questions. My mom and I had walked the mall late at night a couple of days earlier when all the shops were closed and we wrote more than 40 questions from different stores in the area. Answers could be found on signs, price tags, logos, store numbers, light colors, displays, and even the number of chairs in the hair salon (we would have accepted either 36 or 37, because we weren't quite sure ourselves). We were hoping that no sales had changed in the last two days and that no signs would be hidden or mannequin's clothes replaced. What we weren't counting on, was that all the stores in the mall would be closed. I hadn't even thought of that when we were there the day before. Thankfully they'd been closed when we made the questions, and although we whined about the limited options at the time, we were glad we had done it that way, or they wouldn't have been able to find the answers now. But sadly, our fun was all cut short when we realized that they were using this holiday to do some construction in the mall and had caution-taped off almost two-thirds of the mall space. We were so sad that all of our hard work thinking of witty questions had been cut down to 1/3 of its former glory. And we seriously regretted calling the game off earlier the day before. Even if the stores had been closed, at least we could have gotten to walk to them. But who would have ever thought the mall would be blocked off? Not us, that's for sure.
The girls answered as many questions as they could, and then we sat down at the end of the mall for the traditional end-of-the-race puzzle. If any of you have seen The Amazing Race, you should remember this one. I had printed pictures representing each leg of the race and they had to assemble them in the order they had done them. I separated the girls so they couldn't see each other's papers. Right away, they all had one picture they just couldn't place. "When did we go on a plane?" they all said. Even the adults had a hard time figuring it out. Within a couple of minutes they had them all in the right order, except for the airplane. A said she was done, but when I went over to check, she had 9 of the pictures in the right order and had hidden the airplane picture under her leg, hoping I wouldn't notice. Nice try.
Eventually it dawned on C where she had seen a plane and she called me over to check her paper. She was right! Do you remember where it was? It was the plane on the playground they were supposed to find the nickname for. I walked the victorious C out to the car to claim her Easter basket and then came back in to check on the other two. It's possible they looked at C's paper, or that someone had given them a little hint, or maybe they just figured it out on their own, but soon the other two had the right answer as well and I gave them their Easter baskets. They dug into them right there in the middle of the deserted mall floor and began digging right into their candy and treats.
We headed home for some much-needed relaxation at the end of this crazy weekend, but I don't know what in the world I'm going to do for Easter next year!
Actual Date: April 20
No comments:
Post a Comment