The kids and I had fun planning out Mother’s Day this year for the GeekMom. We shopped early and we came up with a fun way to have GeekMom search for her gifts. It was a great way to get everyone involved in the surprise.
Our family is at a point that the oldest child is working evenings, so I was able to take a couple of the kids out early in the week for Mother’s Day shopping. Full disclosure: I’m normally shopping Saturday afternoon/evening before and bemoaning the lack of cards and gifts. This year was different because we had a plan.
Heavily inspired (or perhaps shamelessly stealing) from the May Mystery Issue of Wired, the kids and I decided we would have a series of puzzles for GeekMom to solve to find her next gift. The kids came up with the clues and I encoded them.
We used prison-tap, braille, Caesar shift, and ASCII code to lead Mom from place to place throughout the house. We were nice…we didn’t make Mom go to Google for how to decode or to figure out the type of code. Why? We wanted her to have fun, not give up in frustration.
GeekMom is great at soduku and Minesweeper, so it took her just a little time to figure out each of the clues. The kids had fun trying to decode along with her after having forgotten the clues from the days before.
All in all, we had a great time, and I was able to show my kids the fun of codes one more time.
