Thursday, March 24, 2016

Henry's Spy Party

Last Saturday, we celebrated Henry's 8th birthday with a super sneaky spy party. If it sounds familiar, it is -- Will's 8th birthday party was also a spy-themed one.


We invited Henry's closest friends and had a really good time celebrating our almost-eight-year old!


The spy trainees starting arriving right at 3pm.


The first stop was the Secret Agent Training Center, where the new spies were fingerprinted and given code names.


Henry, Secret Agent 001, is Aggressive Griffin and Will, Secret Agent 002, is Growling Troll.


And this is the agent in charge of training, Agent Double Oh Zero. The name is Bond. Joe Bond.  


He gathered his new trainees and instructed them that once they completed spy training, they would receive their super secret spy gear, located on the mantle above the happy birthday banner.



First up, the obstacle course:   



The trainees had to run and touch all the cones, crawl under the benches without setting off the bomb, and then distract the "protection" and grab the cup from my amazing friend Heather, who graciously offered to come and help out with the party. They all did really well!




 

The trainees came back inside for step 2 of training, which was a memory boosting activity. They had 45 seconds to look at the 15 objects on this tray and then write them down from memory. It's harder than it looks!


The last step was target practice. The trainees had to use Nerf guns to hit towers of Dixie cups.




This boy has so much energy!



The trainees all completed the three phases of training with flying colors and ran back inside to get their super secret gear, only to discover that it was gone -- and a blank piece of paper was left in its place. Will and Henry quickly figured out that the code was written in invisible ink...


and it was a mirror image!


In all, these super sleuths cracked seven codes, everything from pigpen ciphers and Morse code to polybius and reverse alphabet ciphers. 





The clues led them through a laser field and they had to detonate black bombs (balloons) and diffuse a massive stick of dynamite.   




They solved the puzzles and found their spy glasses (pictured on Henry below) in the boys' bathtub.  


We celebrated their hard work with snacks


and cake (German chocolate cake with chocolate ganache).







Happy birthday, Henry!
 


What a fun birthday celebration for our spy-loving boy! 

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