In Home Entertainment: Super Secret Spy Training

We know we can't really complain about the mild winter we've been having, but between the persistent rain and suddenly plunging temps last week, we were going a little stir crazy. Mom reached back into the depths of her Pinterest files and remembered pinning this cool spy training course made with painters tape. So we planned a super secret spy training playdate with one of my good buddies. We used one of our many rolls of baker's twine and washi'd a long continuous strand down a stretch of our hallway -- zig-zagging back and forth, up and down.

It was hard to do it without pulling the whole thing down (the washi tape was good for not leaving marks on the wall, not so durable for withstanding a little tension in the string) and a few times Vegas ran right through it. But we hung it back up several times during the afternoon and even daddy had a turn when he got home from work -- he's actually pretty limber and made funny spy faces.

After we completed our obstacle course, we practiced writing and drawing each other super secret messages. We drew on white paper with q-tips dipped in lemon juice (I insisted on drawing on colored paper of course) and then put those in a 350 degree oven for a few minutes and, BOOM, our drawings appeared! It worked on the colored paper, too.

I asked mom if we could have jello for a snack (who knows why) and she remembered seeing a recipe for glow in the dark jello, which seemed like something super spies would eat. Theoretically, you just follow the regular jello recipe, subbing in tonic water (the quinine glows under UV light) for as much water as you like. We did about 3:1 water to tonic water ratio (and it was still a bit bitter). We then put portable black lights into our light boxes, added our messy tray to the top as a tabletop, and sat down to have our snack. BUT, no real glow. Boo. We think it was probably a combo of not enough of a strong UV light (the little portable ones were from the Target dollar bin) and the jello was probably in too deep of a container (mom made it in little juice glasses -- jigglers would probably have worked better). No worries -- still a good snack and we'll try again!