Valentine's day treasure hunt

I know Valentine's day has come and gone ages ago, but I have to post something or my posting skills get rusty after a week of no use. I spend so much time waiting for letters and emails from the missionary that I don't get my blogging done like I used to.

Around Feb 1st every year, I start wondering why I put myself through this stupid Valentine tradition. But then the morning of the 14th, as Hayley and I headed out to seminary, she said, "treasure hunt?" and I thought, "OK, I'm glad I did it."

 When the kids came home from school, they found this:

Three of the balloons had little pieces of paper with letters on them.

Matt tried this method of determining the letters in his balloon.  Hayley and Paul both popped their balloons. Unfortunately, that tended to send the little pieces of paper in all directions.

Here is Hayley unscrambling her letters so they read "Fork knife spoon."

Matt's unpopped balloon led him to the underside of the coffee table where he found a puzzle.

Hayley found her puzzle. She got a word find with words like "zddpsdat" and "fggua"

Paul got a movie quote quiz which yielded the solution "breakfast."  He looked in all kinds of breakfast type places. He looked in that box three times and finally I told him he wasn't looking hard enough. He had to pull the liner bag out of the box to get his treat.

Paul finally found his treat. 

 I had to keep telling the kids "You aren't looking hard enough." Matt's puzzle led him to the van and he searched it for nearly half an hour (making a huge mess all the while). I even went out and checked to make sure that I had put the treat out there (I had). He just wasn't looking hard enough. The treat was wedged between the back seat and the side of the van. Since it was in a plain paper bag, he had overlooked it in his search.

Paul had trouble finding his puzzle from his balloon letters. It spelled out "toilet paper" and he looked in every toilet paper roll location EXCEPT inside the roll on the dispenser in the downstairs bathroom.  And his breakfast search took a while too.

Hayley found hers quickly but she actually had to wait until the next day, because her word find, which yielded a coded message, led her to the seminary cabinet at church. So she had to wait until the next morning to get it.

Hayley had complained a bit about the difficulty of her puzzle while trying to solve her word find  and I replied, "You can learn life lessons from these Valentine's day treasure hunts: sometimes life is hard and you get very little reward." She thought that was funny.