So What’s the Plan for Spring Break?

Like a lot of parents, we like to give advice. Like a lot of parents, we don’t like to take advice. So maybe that’s why we never take our own advice when it comes to spring break. Every year our advice goes like this: “Spring break is coming! Make a plan or you’ll be sorry!” And then spring break comes around, we don’t have a plan and we are plenty sorry.

We are not sure why that is. We have learned our lesson when it comes to summer camps. It only took one year of trying to book camps too late and ending up at the sweltering playground all summer to sort that one out. It is barely March and we are already planning for July and August. But why not spring break?

Maybe it’s because it seems so short. But it’s not, really. It’s nine days long. And where we live the playgrounds are still soggy and freezing, not that we want to hang out at the monkeybars all week anyway.

We think the problem is February. Winter has doubled down and the daily grind is grim. Mornings are bleak and groggy, lunches are a drag, the kids keep “forgetting” their homework and everyone’s boots and coats are covered with mud. We all need a break, and spring break seems like the light at the end of the tunnel. A lovely, happy, sunny, effortless, nine-day spring break of harmonious family bliss, right? Right?

Right. So here is a plan, or at least part of a plan: Order a Mail Order Mystery. Normally we send the installments out once a week for six weeks. But send an email to info@mailordermystery.com and ask us to have your entire mystery shipped all together in one box.

Then when the kids say “I’m bored”, or you say “get off those screens and find something to do”, you can slip another clue into the mailbox. And your Junior Agents, Treasure-Hunters and Noble Oath-Swearers can spend their spring break putting their heads together to solve ciphers and clues, catching the plotting villains and joining forces with dragons and trolls.