A mystery and a musical.

M had just about finished preparing her mystery for A to solve with Detective Fox (a puppet with many different professions that is something that is very much a Daddy & girls thing) by the middle of the week.  Unfortunately Wednesday is swimming night and A was late home anyway and he was off to Amsterdam from Thursday until very late Friday.  This meant that it wasn't until Saturday after lunch (M needed some time to plant various clues and alter one of the notes and A had various things to do in the morning) that we set things in motion.  K & I had been drafted in to help point A & Detective Fox in the direction of some clues, so after helping M set things up, I told A that I was a bit concerned because I'd heard some strange noises one evening while he was away out by the shed and please could he check it out (he didn't realise to start with that it was to do with the mystery and thought I was serious).  This lead to the discovery of the first of three notes (written on paper stained with a used tea bag and torn to look old), which were written in runes and needed decoding.  There were also a couple of other clues, one to indicate where the baddies were meeting (the shed) and one with a D and two patterned rectangular shapes, which were meant to be rugs to indicate that Drugs were involved.

The notes, the dimetrodon baddies and the rescued lion.

The drugs!

 Rather fortuitously, the final note revealed that the baddies, who had stolen a lion from a zoo using drugs to sedate it and who were going to paint it and then sell it to a circus, were meeting in the shed at 2.30pm that very day!  It was just gone 2.30 when A decoded the final message and he manage to catch the baddies in the act, solve the mystery and save the lion.  Hurray!

On Saturday evening we had K's birthday treat.  It's a bit early, as her birthday isn't until next month, that wasn't a problem.  This is the third year in a row that K has chosen a trip to the theatre instead of a party, which I must admit is so much easier!  For her 9th birthday it was just the two of us (M opting out) to see A Comedy of Errors at the RSC in Stratford (nice and easy as Granny and Big Grandad live nearby, so we all stayed with them), last year she asked if we could see Matilda the Musical again (we had been to see it when it first opened in Stratford for a Christmas treat a couple of years previously), so we went down to London.  This year was closer to home, as Shrek the Musical is touring and in Nottingham this month.  We had said she could take a friend or two and she wanted to take A & J, but since it is A's birthday in a couple of weeks S and C their parents came too and we all had tea in Pizza Express first.  K & M both love Shrek the film and can recite various parts of it, the musical follows the film very closely and it's really well done.  Lord Farquaad is particularly hilarious, running across the stage on his knees with fake legs attached to his thighs, absolutely brilliant.  All in all a fantastic evening and now M's contemplating a theatre trip for her birthday next June (current first choice would be Matilda *again* or Cats if possible).

Waiting for the show to start!

In other news, both girls have been doing more coding on Khan Academy, we're continuing with The Dragonfly Pool and working on a big tidy up of the playroom with a view to possibly getting rats for Christmas (the rats would live in there and in order for the girls to be able to get them out, the room would need to be kept tidy, considerably tidier than is usually currently the case, so we'll see).