This morning at breakfast, Jan offers Bree a banana. Bree responds: “Have you ever heard of the banana sketch?” Jan cracks up — Bree is reenacting a scene from a Muppet Show episode she saw a month ago, in which everyone is trying to convince Kermit that there’s a famous stage act called “The Banana Sketch”.
On Sunday evenings, we hold a family meeting over dessert. We borrowed a practice from some friends: starting the meeting by having everyone go around and say “Thank you” to another family member for something. For example, Jan or Angela may thank one of the girls for having been particularly helpful cleaning up at some point in the past week.
A while back, Sabriya on her own said she wanted to say thank you to Daddy. What for? “Thank you Daddy for working.” Jan seemed pretty pleased with this, which Bree was quick to notice. She now mentions this every single week—and it works every single time.
Liya levels up in our dinner table manners game. A long while back, we established an incentive program for the girls to show good manners at the table: show good manners a certain number of times in a row, and win the privilege of accompanying Mom and Dad on a date night. After some initial success, we stopped paying attention to this game, but recently resumed it.
Anya and Bree are still at the Beginner level; if they were skiers, they’d be working on the green circle runs. They’re just working on staying in their seats. Liya quickly nailed that, so she’s been working on the Intermediate (blue square) level: using utensils, eating neatly, asking to be excused, and clearing her place. Tonight she nails that, and will be joining us at some point in the near future at a nice restaurant.
Much discussion ensues about what challenges lie ahead on the black diamond Expert level.
Liya completes a week-long rock climbing camp with a field trip to the mountains, where she gets to climb some real rocks. She’s proud to make it all the way up a route with a respectable 5.9 difficulty rating.
Angela has knee surgery. In college, she tore her ACL while skiing, and the surgery to repair apparently never did the trick. She’s decided to finally get it fixed again, and today’s operation is the first step: to undo the earlier operation and prepare the knee for the next one. Her recovery from this fairly simple first step is expected to go pretty quickly; she’ll do the second, more significant, surgery in four months or so.
Bree shares a moment with Angela as Angela rests at home from surgery.
Jan returns from a very quick work trip to Japan. He arrived there with Robbie on Monday afternoon, and left Wednesday afternoon, with not nearly enough sleep in between. The weather included record-breaking heat and steam room humidity. On the plus side: it’s always fun to visit Japan, we ate some great food, and our hosts were extremely gracious. As a parting gift, they gave us each a bottle of an outstanding Tokaji wine from Hungary. Back in Seattle, Jan cracks open the bottle after dinner so he and Angela can each enjoy a tiny glass. It’s nice to be back home!
Bree is wearing a cushion on her head. Somehow our household has evolved a tradition that, when this particular cushion is worn, it is called the Genius Hat. Upon donning the cushion, it is traditional to exclaim, “I’m a genius!”
We go down the street for our annual round of blackberry picking. This year we didn’t wait too long, so all three girls gather some nice ripe berries. On the walk back, Anya gives Bree a ride home.
Liya’s Mysterious Benedict Party. For her seventh birthday party, Liya asks Jan to create another birthday treasure hunt, this one themed after “The Mysterious Benedict Society” books by Trenton Lee Stewart. In the book series, a benevolent Mr. Benedict assembles a crack team of puzzling-solving children to assist with projects such as saving the world. Before a child can join the Society, they must pass a series of tests to prove their intellectual and physical mettle. Using this sort of entrance exam as a model, Jan creates a treasure hunt with a sequence of puzzles of different types.
Angela assembles a cool collection of gear for each kid. In the book series, a girl named Kate Weatherall carries a bucket full of useful stuff: rope, magnet, slingshot, etc. So Angela prepares a bright red bucket for each child with this stuff, to serve both as party favors and as tools for the completing the puzzles.
Liya has indicated that she wants this to be a “half sleepover” party: the guests will come with a change of pajamas and toothbrushes. They’ll do everything to get ready for bed, such that their parents can pick them up somewhat late and drive them straight home to bed. All the guests (Arantxa, Charlotte, Ella, Jane, Katherine, and Katie) arrive, and shortly thereafter the treasure hunt begins.
Anya, in the role of Mr. Benedict’s assistant, Rhonda, begins the treasure hunt by welcoming the guests and giving an introduction to Mr. Benedict. When she’s finished, a video message appears on the large screen behind her.
Mr. Benedict, an avuncular man in a plaid jacket and vaguely British accent, explains that the birthday party is something of a ruse. He’s really gathered them for testing to see if they’re worthy of being admitted to his team of puzzle-solving, world-saving children. Several times during his welcome speech, Mr. Benedict gets excited and falls asleep, to humorous effect. (Mr. Benedict is played by our friend Bruce, who gracious agreed to contribute some time on Sunday morning a week ago. He nailed his part, and Jan had trouble not laughing during the recording.)
After the message, Rhonda (Anya) distributes a red bucket full of gear to each child. Each bucket is tagged with a form of two-dimensional bar code called a QR code. Anya explains the use of the Society’s code detectors (Apple iPhones running an application that can scan and translate QR codes). She shows each participant how to use the scanner to read the code attached to their bucket. Scanning the code produces a message indicating which of three teams the child has been assigned to.
Once the kids are formed into teams, a second video message from Mr. Benedict appears, wherein he wishes them good luck. A set of QR codes appear on the TV screen, and each team scans their code to determine where to head for their first challenge: the backyard, the upstairs loft, or “under the fireplace”. (Each team will soon discover they have to complete all three challenges.)
Backyard balloon toss. In the backyard, Liya’s grandmother, Lyn, welcomes the teams of girls to the backyard water balloon target range. (Our original plan had been to have the girls use the slingshots in their buckets to hit the targets, but the slingshots proved to be inadequate, and our sample balloon shots all landed at our feet. The girls were told they could just throw the balloons.) The first team to do this manages to hit the bull’s eye target on their second shot. (Other teams take quite a bit longer.) Behind the target they find a black and white jigsaw puzzle piece, plus a QR code that sends them to the upstairs loft.
Paint by numbers. In the upstairs loft, Angela hands each arriving team a grid full of single digit numbers, along with instructions to fill in the squares containing odd numbers. They find black markers in their buckets, which they use to fill in the squares. They produce a black and white pixelated grid that forms another QR code. This one sends them to the front living room downstairs, where they’re supposed to look “under the fireplace”. Before leaving, Angela hands them another jigsaw puzzle piece.
Under the fireplace. Anya (still acting as Rhonda) watches the teams arrive in the living room and mill around the fireplace. They’re not quite sure how it could be possible to look under the fireplace there. The interior of the fireplace looks empty, but close examination—using a flashlight from their bucket—reveals a small metal plate in the center of the fireplace. A brave girl or two lift this plate to reveal a hole into darkness.
(It was Angela who recalled this nearly forgotten feature of our 1928 fireplace. The hole is quite useful: when the fireplace gets full of ashes, you simply sweep them into the hole. The ashes drop into a chamber in the basement that can be emptied periodically through a small door in the garage. We’ve only emptied the chamber twice: once years ago, and again in preparation for this party.)
Looking down into the hole with their flashlights, the girls can see a plastic bag or something about four feet down. It’s too far to reach. Anya gently prods them to consider whether there might be anything in their bucket that might help them retrieve the plastic bag. For some reason, each team possess at least one girl whose first thought is: “The magnet!” (Now, it turns out that the magnet is exactly what they need—there’s a piece of metal in each bag. The real puzzler is: at the time the magnet suggestion is first raised, none of the girls actually knows there’s metal in the bag, so we’re wondering what they think magnets can actually do.)
The girls eventually realize they can tie the rope from the bucket onto the magnet, and lower the magnet through the hole to fish for the bag. For Liya’s team, Liya ends up doing this solo, because her partner is scared of the dark. On the other two teams, two girls collaborate: one shines the flashlight down the hole, and the other girl lowers the magnet. Each time a girl successfully picks up a bag with the magnet, we hear an exultant, “I got it!”
Inside the bag they find another jigsaw piece, and a clue directing them to the backyard. (The three locations form a cycle. Once a team completes the cycle, they’re given a new QR code to scan. This one launches a video on the phone they’re holding. Mr. Benedict appears, and tells them to go back to the family room where they started.)
Sample QR code puzzle. Interested parties with the wherewithal to install a QR code scanning application on their phone can scan this code to see one of the video instructions from Mr. Benedict.
Final puzzle. As the teams reconvene in the family room, they each produce the three jigsaw puzzle pieces they’ve collected. There’s quite a bit of consternation as they try to assemble these pieces into a puzzle—the pieces are just black and white squares, and they have no idea what the final puzzle will look like. (This puzzle, created from paper and foamcore board, took forever for Jan to cut out with tiny cuts of an X-acto knife.) After a suitably long while, the girls finally snap the pieces together to form a final QR code. All the girls shout hooray. Well, almost all the girls: one girl bursts into tears, crying: “I didn’t get to put a piece in!” Another girl gives her a hug, and the decision is made to let the sad girl be the one to scan the puzzle to extract a password to give to Mr. Benedict.
Mr. Benedict appears on the screen once more. He’s very excited the girls have all finished his challenges, and accordingly falls asleep many times in succession. He says he wants to thank them by sharing some treats with them. The video ends, and everyone heads to the dining room for dinner.
In all the excitement of the puzzles, Angela has forgotten to order the pizza she’d intended for dinner. She places the order, and announces that this will be a “backwards dinner”, with dessert coming first. All the girls applaud. Per Liya’s request, the birthday cake is a pan of brownies of sprinkles on them (cooked in our all-edge brownie baking pan).
After brownies, and later the pizza, the girls change into pajamas and settle in for a screening of the movie “Totoro”. (Most of the girls had wanted to watch a different movie, “Kiki’s Delivery Service”, but time was running short, and Totoro is a slightly shorter movie.) The girls snuggle under blankets while they watch. Their parents arrive just before the end of the movie, and all the girls head home with their red buckets.
Bree got this duck on our trip to the East Coast. She really likes that, when you squeeze it, water squirts out of it. The duck has ended up with the somewhat unfortunate moniker, “Peeing Duck”.