Pirate Egg Hunt!

On Thursday night I took Nathan to the Egg Marks the Spot egg hunt at Bellaboo's Play and Discovery Center, which you might recall is the children's museum in Northwest Indiana where we had Nathan's birthday party. It was a pirate theme, and kids were supposed to dress up like pirates. I made this hat using an online tutorial, a cereal box, and a random piece of foam I had left over from some other project I intended to do and never did. I think I did okay for a non-crafty person.

As you can see, the child has achieved the developmental milestone known as the "cheesy forced picture smile" stage

First up: designing your own treasure map.

The kid was obsessed with this map. While all the other kids were up doing some sort of lively pirate dance, he was sitting there on the floor studying the map. (I might remind you that he made this map himself, and that it had absolutely no resemblance to any real place, unless there's a place somewhere that consists of water, red scribbles, and a "T" to mark the spot for the treasure.) Anyway, as he sat there in silence studying a map while the others danced, all I could think was, OMG, he is his father, a fact that was confirmed later when Bill told me a story about he spent hours poring over a treasure map that he was given on a family vacation once, presumably while his two brothers beat up on him.

The map also makes a good telescope.

I could tell he was overwhelmed when we first entered the room. (The same party room, I might note, where 4 out of our 8 party guests entered and immediately started crying. Is this room emitting some horrible high-pitched noise that only children under 5 can hear?) Anyway Nathan finally warmed up and participated in one game, the Octopus Ring Toss.

Finally the egg hunt commenced, and the entire museum was just littered with colorful plastic eggs containing wholesome, non-edible prizes like necklaces, 80s-style plastic bracelets, pirate-themed Silly Bandz, and stickers. You were supposed to put the stickers on your treasure map:

I snapped this shot just as he was expressing disappointment over a girl taking an egg he wanted. You can see why he was so disappointed, since clearly there were so few eggs.

Oh look, he's rebounded.

So the deal was that after you opened an egg, you were supposed to put the shells in the bins, which represented the Magic Sea Witch's pool. The rule was that you were supposed to hunt for one egg at a time, empty it, and then put the shell in the bin. Of course, since a large group of children was involved, this plan was shot straight to hell. Every kid hoarded as big a handful of eggs as he or she could carry, then opened up the eggs and dropped the shells on the floor. The result was that at the end, all that was left to find were empty shells, and parents were nagging kids to help clean up. For possibly the first time ever, my kid willingly cleaned up without any protest, so of course I had to photograph the moment:

It was in the Water Play Room, hence the smock. I don't make him wear that all the time.

When the hunt was over, Nathan wanted to play in the Soft Play Area, which is basically an overly-obnoxious, buzz-wordy name for a jungle gym with a ball pit. It's no wonder that a generation of parents who worry about "Nature Deficit Disorder" and know their children's reading lexiles would need to send their kids to a place called a Soft Play Area, when in the 1980s the same area would be called a jungle gym or Chuck E. Cheese.

Next we went to the cooking area, where the recipe that day was "eggels," which were bagels decorated like Easter eggs using colorful cream cheese.

At the end, the Sea Witch had a magical surprise: She had transformed all the egg shells into beach balls for a special beach ball dance party!

I'm pretty sure we'll have a similar picture of him in 15 years when he's at a drunken spring break party in Cabo.

What stood out to me from this whole experience was how I genuinely had fun with Nathan. I mean, yes, I have had fun with him before. But so often I have taken him to kids' events where he just isn't quite old enough, and he gets overwhelmed and frazzled and I'm disappointed. Or else I'm so excited about The Big Exciting Thing That is the Point of the Activity, and then Nathan's favorite thing is the drinking fountain on the side next to the restroom. (Which, I know, all of these disappointments are related to my unrealistic expectations, but they're disappointing nonetheless.) But finally with the egg hunt, it seemed like he understood the purpose of the event, and did what he was supposed to, and got excited about it. It truly somehow felt like a turning point to me, one that I'm really happy about. It's like maybe, sort of, somehow, he is taking the first step to becoming an actual person.