Treasure Hunt

I forget sometimes how easy it is to make time special for E.

This past Shabbat was kind of a wash as far as going to Saturday morning services - H. has had a cold and pretty much slept all of Saturday and I was strapped into a portable heart monitoring device (I didn't really think it through when I agreed to go to the cardiologist on Friday morning to get strapped into a Holter monitor - for some reason I thought it would be less intrusive to do it over the weekend. Although the longest time I spent in the thing was on Friday at work with my coat on all day, trying to make sure no one could see it. Once again, how it would affect Shabbat did not occur to me until it was too late.)

So I spent the whole day alone with E., sticking to my rule that we could only go out to do Shabbosdik things.

And we found plenty to do. But the hit of the day was a treasure hunt. I forget how the idea came up, but it once it was out there it really seemed to capture E.'s imagination. He had gotten a giant foam world map puzzle for his birthday, so he started taking pieces of that as his treasure map to find "X marks the spot." Meanwhile, I managed to put together a pretty convincing treasure.

A while ago, I had taken an empty candy tin and lined it with pretty paper, with the idea that I would keep something special in it. I added some stray faux gems and sequins, 2 plastic skeleton keys that I had inexplicably discovered in my closet shoe bag the other day, and other bibs and bobs I had laying around. I had a satin drawstring bag from a cosmetic sample I was never going to use, so I put the treasure inside it, hid it, and we spent the afternoon playing hotter/colder.

It was great fun.

By the way, as you can see in the photo, there was a bag of chocolate Hanukkah gelt involved in the game. E. has had his eye on this since last week when I started pulling out Hanukkah decorations and surprisingly did NOT eat any of it despite finding it as "treasure."

But that does bring up the point that Hanukkah is less than a month away! So stop back soon for some fun Chanukah ideas coming in the next week or so.