One of My Favorite Traditions

Secret Agent Valentines

1. Get each child a Valentine gift. Make your kids go downstairs while you ready the game.

2. Attach gift to a ball of yarn. Hide the gift somewhere and then string the yarn through the house - in and out of cupboards, around doorknobs, underneath tables, you get the idea.

3. Once you have made a lot of laser looking strings going through the house, cut the yarn and tie the end to something secure.
4. Repeat steps two and three for each child's present, tying all of the ends in the same place.

5. The central location where you tied the ends of the string (in this case, the bannister at Grandma and Grandpa's place in St. George) is now the beginning of the game. Call the kids upstairs. This part is really fun. They love to ooh and aah about how the house looks like it is full of secret agent lasers. Once they've admired your hard stringing efforts, you can tell them which string belongs to which kid. Do NOT let them cut the string. Cutting will loosen the string and the effect is lost. Each kid follows the appropriate string through the house to find his or her present.
6. It is smart to wrap the presents in the same wrapping paper and not label them. That way if they get their string mixed up they haven't revealed someone else's present. And someone will inevitably get a string mixed up, especially if you have them all strung on the same doorknob at some point (heh, heh, heh!).

7. I love this one! It's one of the few things I actually came up with on my own. If you try this, be prepared to repeat it every year, it's that fun!