The Food That Made Me

7/13/2025

Kids, I hope you will have fun with your cousins. Yesterday, we had your cousins over to the house to do a wizard theme in-house escape room for number one’s birthday present. Mommy put on Harry Potter music to make it even more wizard-themed. Emi didn’t like the sounds, though, and she barked her little head off at the owl balloons.

So, number one and number two arrived to the house around 2pm instead of 1pm, which was good because we were running behind schedule setting up. Setting up took way more than half an hour.

We welcomed our two witches. They made their wands. We named ourselves the Golden Trio. Originally, they thought the trio was number 1, number 2, and Emi, which was cute. We had five professors whom we needed to complete challenges for in order to find the book of Morti.

For the first challenge, in puzzle form, they had to figure out the weight of different objects. Number one did most of the work while number two was distracted. If one was 20 and there were three 10 weights on the scale, … Mommy had to give some hints. There was a lot of math thinking, but number one solved it. It was awesome! But, I was a little scared that the first challenge was so hard.

There was another divination puzzle with numbers and patterns. I think that my brain doesn’t work as quickly now. What patterns? I just see lots of colors.

They really enjoyed the Quidditch challenge. We had hiking sticks as our brooms and we flew around to find goal posts? We needed to throw paper balls into the goals. It was a blast and also a little harder than we thought.

One of the most fun activities was the potion challenge. They had to figure out four mystery drinks that were concealed. It was fun watching their reactions for salted water and root beer. Their reactions of disgust were beautiful. Don’t worry, nieces, one day you’ll be enjoying root beer. Don’t worry, their faces were filled with delight when they drank chocolate milk. Maybe we should play a game where we just guess drinking a bunch of liquids.

The final challenge was a where’s Waldo and solving of the puzzle map. Afterwards, they found the Book of X. Congratulations on saving the world, kids.

Number two wants an escape room game similar for her birthday now. So, I guess she really enjoyed it too. 50 points to Daddy.

Afterwards, we had to take Emi on a walk. We walked through 4 parks, and they climbed through all of the play structures. Oh my goodness, they can swing the monkey bars so well now. At the last park, they needed to lie on the ground to rest and catch their breath. I texted their mommy that they needed baths. So, we walked through an apartment complex near the last park, apparently, there were lots of ponds and rivers near it. It was awesome, they were just filled with wonder, and for their backyard to be the same. Great job walking so far. Even I was getting tired.

We walked to the pizza place and we had 15 minutes to wait. So, they spent their time playing in the water fountains across the street. They couldn’t get wet, so they just covered the holes with their hands. Other children were soaked. They had so much fun that they wanted to come back tomorrow with their swimsuits. I guess another win.

Finally, dinner time. They enjoyed the cheese pizza. They took home the balloon owls as souvenirs. Mission accomplished.

We would love to have them back more often. Hopefully, they will continue staying silly and enjoying the simple pleasures of life. I hope that they will also enjoy playing with you guys as they get older.