Easter egg treasure hunt. Puzzle-style!

Sarah's Easter morning began with this message:

Her first reaction?  "What, no chocolate?"  To be fair, last year I did a similar search, but I put a few small chocolates in the eggs with the clues and this year I did not.  This is Sarah's "are you kidding me" face:

After we dealt with the no chocolate trauma, I convinced her to go look in her shoes.  In one of them,  she found a plastic egg containing this note:

Rearranging THOBUT to get HOT TUB, she headed out to the backyard.

Next clue:

This one was a bit tough for her, but eventually she headed down to the basement to find this clue on top of the dryer:

By this time, Sarah was into solving the puzzles and running around from place to place in the house.  Look, she's having fun!

The next clue was on top of the fridge:

This picture sent her outside to an apple tree in the front yard, which she has loved to climb since she was 4 or so.

In the tree was this clue:

As all Rhianna fans know, she is friends with the monster under her bed.  So off Sarah went to look there.  She was a little nervous that there might really be a monster...

 And there was!

And she liked him!

Next clue:

In the furnace room, another clue was found:

She had no problem with this one, and quickly figured out the next clue was in the change jar I keep on my dresser.

Holding this note up to the mirror sent her to the fireplace next.  

The remaining letters spell out C A R, so back outside to find the last clue:

Success at last!

HAPPY EASTER!

Sarah sleeps with the fishes while we have a party.

When I first asked Bruce what kind of party he wanted for his 50th birthday, he said "an orgy".  His second choice was a toga party.

Eventually, I was able to talk him down to a child-free hot tub party.

Due to the fact that we are middle aged and a lot of our friends have kids, and no babysitters, we did away with the kid-free idea.  Due to a completely understandable mistake (that could have happened to anyone!), I caused the sponge that usually floats on top of the hot tub to be sucked into the impeller of the pump and thus, killed the hot tub.  Due to a series of scheduling snafus, we had to rebook Bruce's birthday celebration twice, and it ended up conflicting with a Girl Guide sleepover at Ripley's aquarium.

So, the party we had turned out to be completely different from the one we had envisioned.   And it was awesome!  Bruce gathered together old friends, new friends, people from high tech, people from fandom, people from health care, people from the arts; it was like a Venn diagram where everyone overlapped with everyone else in at least one area, and the conversation flowed in such a natural, relaxed way that everyone had a great time.  Copious amounts of Bruce's white wine helped too!

Adding to the enjoyment, we turned off all the lights for Earth Hour, and lit candles all over the house.  It was actually quite magical.  The darkness also allowed us to better appreciate all 50(!) candles on Bruce's cake!

A great big thanks to all our friends who came out to help Bruce celebrate his big 5-0; you made the evening memorable, and we feel blessed to have you in our lives.

Meanwhile, Sarah and the rest of the Girl Guides were off to Ripley's Aquarium.  They got a private, behind the scenes tour of the aquarium.  Then, they got to sleep in the shark tunnel!

In the morning, I drove down to pick up the girls, and we had free admission for the day, so I got to see the whole aquarium.  My favourite's were the jellyfish and the seahorses.  Sarah really liked the Sting rays.

Random pictures from Ripley's Aquarium: