My Paddington Bear Birthday Treasure Hunt

We have been so busy these past couple of weeks enjoying the summer. I am looking forward to sharing about all of our fun outings and activities this week on my blog. This past week was my birthday, and my kids, my son's girlfriend and her sister, and my dear hubby planned such a nice day for me I am excited to share about it.

The morning of my birthday I was told to stay in my bedroom and enjoy a quiet morning with a nice cup of coffee and watch an episode or two of one of my current favorite Netflix shows, Murder She Wrote, while everyone worked on brunch and secret birthday plans.  When everything was ready I was called out to a lovely brunch of bacon and cheesy eggs and my favorite cornmeal pancakes, and a house all decked out in pretty orange and yellow streamers. When brunch was over, I was directed to open a gift sitting next to me and begin my birthday treasure hunt. The first gift was a glow stick princess wand, and I was made queen of the day. :)

Then came the treasure hunt, my family knows I love sleuthing type mysteries, and I LOVE Paddington Bear, so they made the treasure hunt Paddington Bear themed! They found this cute Paddington Bear craft on Pinterest, and used each Paddington Bear to hold a clue. They even made a Paddington Facebook page with a message that was one of the clues! I was very impressed with how creative this was, and I had a very fun time figuring out the clues and following each clue to another destination, each location had a fun present to open and another clue.

Such cute Paddington's!

There were all sorts of goodies, scrapbooking stickers, bubbles, Paddington's favorite- and mine - Marmalade Jam, a fun old western style cap gun (I had been telling them all about the cap guns I used to play with as a kid every summer), some immensely cute miniature dinosaurs, a new flower for my garden, all sorts of fun little goodies, and a very nice birthday card with a special note from all the kids.

A beautiful new orchid for my collection from Gary, and a nice birthday note as well, and then the last clue led me to a very exciting gift- the new camera I had been eyeing! That took some real planning, they had to find the camera on my Amazon account, then use my daughter's Amazon account to order it, and somehow intercept the delivery man without my knowing, and trust me, my two labs make such a fuss when Mr. UPS man arrives that that is pretty tricky, they managed to pull it off, I had no idea, it was quite a surprise. :)

Here's the Amazon link to my new camera, I love the vintage brown color of the camera, and am excited to upgrade my very very old point and shoot to this new one with a lot more features, I look forward to learning how to use all of the new settings.




I had a few other birthday treats as well, a new fox cookie jar that I spotted at Target a couple of weekends ago, and completely fell in love with.

I also went on a pre-birthday shopping trip to stock up on some new drawing supplies to go with a fun new book series called Illustration School, so far there are four books in the series, Illustration School: Let's Draw Happy People, also one of cute animals, then one on plants and small animals, and one about using color. I am very excited to go through these books and work on my drawing a bit.

After my very exciting and fun treasure hunt, we had a fun day enjoying some family movies, croissant sandwiches for lunch, and a trip to a new antique store in town which I will share about in another post, then a nice dinner and a delicious birthday cake with lemon filling- yum! I was really quite pampered, and had an amazing day! To my hubby and all the kids - thank you very much!! What a very special and memorable day!