My son Vigil enjoyed a pirate treasure birthday party when he turned four. It was his dream to be a pirate. He has amazing fantasies about it that gain fuel from the Wiggles’ Captain Feathersword in combination with Fisher Price’s Imaginext pirate toys. We decked out the dining room table with the Imaginext pirate ship, complete with skeleton-men maties, cannons, and the requisite pirate flags. The kids we decked out with bead necklaces (surely obtained from their most recent village-pillage) and skull-and-crossbones scarf hats.

The party really got going when we started the treasure hunt. To get this done I had to do some planning. First there was the issue of having some clues ready. Next there was the requisite pirate treasure map. Lastly of course there had to be some treasure.

I started with a simple tin, lockable treasure chest, one for each kid. I filled them with plastic gold coins, strands of plastic pearls, and gold-foil-wrapped chocolate coins (of course—so the treasure could be consumed! What are they going to do with plastic coins for goodness sakes?). I found a spot to hide this treasure (buried, naturally, in the yard), devised a few misleading clues and such along the way, and we had at it.

River gave the kids instructions and each got a small pirate telescope so they could search properly for clues. This way beyond exciting for them; this was euphoria, a kind of pirate heaven. Their first clue was to look up high in some old hole to see what could be seen. Naturally this led them dashing upstairs searching for holes. They looked in closets and cabinets and drawers and someone figured out that they should go higher, so they found their way to the unfinished attic. A bit of a search led them right to a gaping hole in the wall where—indeed—a clue was waiting for them.

The clue consisted of a bundled-up bandanna holding a few items. I had decided that it was unfair to prepare written clues, since the birthday boy, at four, was in no position to read, and being totally reliant on his oldest sibling for the decryption of written words was not going to fly. Instead I wanted this to be a real set of tangible clues, something you can hold and all the kids would be on equal footing to figure out what it was. In this case the clue was a few chunks of black asphalt.

Onward ho, downstairs, where of course a little bit of prancing around and showing off was necessary before moving on to discovery of the next clue. (Getting credit for success is an all-important aspect of pirate-development.)

The kids cleverly realized that the asphalt chunks had come from the decrepit old driveway in back of the house. But I had not made it as easy as stumbling outside. The next clue was actually partially buried and they first had to locate the exact spot. With some adult assistance and a garden spade, problem solved. The next clue was a bit tricky. I had selected a few choice bits of fern to indicate where to look next. This set the kids off looking all around the yard and digging around wondering if this plant or that might be fern, and oh isn’t the treasure here? Or here? Or here?

Finally they spotted it and revealed the next clue, which was another small bandanna bundle, this time holding a couple of scraps of silk cloth and a little palmful of reddish mulch. This was immediately recognized as mulch from the plant beds in front of the house, so the children rushed off to search there.

As it turned out, our cat Luigi was lurking (and I think even sleeping) right near where the treasure had been hidden, in a nook right near the brick foundation of the house, buried under a pile of mulch. We pretended he was some kind of foul beast guarding the treasure and maybe the kids should look there, after what seemed like prolonged minutes of searching and seeking and unsuccessful looking.

The wrapped box contained a reward—three plastic pearl strands, one for each child—in addition to the usual clue. This time the clue was a few chunks of ancient, crumbling red brick. Where in the heck could this have come from, the kids seemed to wonder.

After figuring out that it could not have been from the outside of the brick foundation—which was painted red, and did not match the unpainted brick—the kids decided (with a bit of adult encouragement, as I recall) to descend through the bulkhead and into the basement. Ooooo… creepy.

Council tried to maintain a lead this entire time and I think the descent to the basement was no different. She was clearly a sort of advanced player in this whole treasure hunt game and while she was at times challenged by it, she was mostly up to the challenge, so we had to keep reminding to her to give Vigil a chance to get somewhere first or open something first… kind of exhausting… I’ll have to remember to give her extra points for figuring out something much harder next time.

Down in the basement the task was to find a matching area of mouldering brick. This was actually a little hard for the kids because, well, the basement walls consist almost entirely of mouldering brick. However I do believe River more or less indicated the appropriate area, lit by a single dangling light bulb. A colorful scrap of cloth sticking out from some loose bricks was an especially helpful visual clue.

Everyone kept anticipating this to be the real bona-fide treasure but what we were really waiting for (and River had prepped them for this) was to discover the treasure map… to lead us to the actual treasure. So here it was at last. And well-wrapped in at least two shades of silk cloth. It had been down here in the basement for at least two centuries.

Unwrapping the map revealed a cryptic set of images that bizarrely resembled our very own backyard, intoned in Crayola colors by Council herself earlier that day. (She was kept in the dark about where X would mark the spot.) The children had uncanny familiarity with what the map showed… and it was all to easy for them to identify where exactly the treasure must be…

So off they went to uncover it. The X showed the treasure to be located in a far corner of the yard, in a spot where a lot of weeds had been pulled several weeks earlier and was easily diggable dirt surrounded by large chunks of granite rock (which I had unearthed weeks earlier as well). Everyone gathered round and did their best to dig, giving the birthday boy dibs.

This picture does not do the chaos and frenzy of these last moments any justice. Believe me, it was tense, it was exciting, we were all breaking a sweat. And after this I lost all ability to document the story any further… we were overwhelmed by the sparkling jewels, coins and chocolate…

And enjoyed some good cake afterwards.