tutorial

How to Make a Super Fun Summer Obstacle Course for Cheap!

DIY, Lifestyle, Mom Life, Motherhood

If this is your first time here, Welcome! I’m a mom of four girls who works night shift as a laboratory scientist. I homeschool my girls during the day, and I’m constantly trying to come up with new ideas to stay awake all day (while showing my girls the beauty in life). Corona has us all going a little crazy cooped up in the house, right? I planned to blow up the girls’ unicorn sprinkler and let them run around in the front yard, but it had a hole in it. It was way too hot to have a day outside without water so we improvised (which always does end up in the best day ever in my experience).

When we purchased our house, our realtor brought us over a moon bounce the next day!   There were five kids, infant to age 8 so to make this day fun for everyone would take a little work. Most of what I used were just items that we had in the garage. We had a smaller moon bounce/inflatable that served to keep the younger kids occupied while the older kids completed the course. The smaller inflatable was purchased second hand for super cheap.

While the moon bounce was a fun touch, it’s really not needed. This was the end of the course, and everything else leading up to it would have been enough. Here is what I used! Let’s get started!

Toys Used:

  • Two Peppa Pig Trikes (obviously don’t have to be peppa, but the trikes being small made it harder to peddle haha)
  • Hula Hoops
  • Kiddie Pool
  • Baseball and Bat
  • Pop up tent/tunnel
  • Bubbles
  • Water
  • DIY slip and slide (instructions provided)
  • Two Inflatables

Rundown of the Obstacle Course: First, the girls each had to peddle on the tiny trikes to the hula hoops. Once they picked up the hula hoops, they had to hula to the pineapple float (these fun floats were purchased from Target for about $3, I had a Flamingo also). Next, they had to slide down the slip and slide, crawl through the tunnel (pop up tent) and run to the kiddie pool. Once in the kiddie pool, they threw a ball in the air and hit it with the baseball bat. The final task was to run to the moon bounce, and climb to the top of the “wall” in the middle.

Tip: I added water, soap, and bubbles inside of the moon bounce so that it made it harder to get to the top at the end!

 

How I made the slip and slide: You can made this with any thick plastic. I used an old inflatable ball pit that had a hole. I cut it, spread it out, and we put two plastic stakes to hold the plastic in place. You can obviously make this bigger, but since it was just part of the obstacle course, it was the perfect size. You could use old pool floats and if you don’t have anything laying around, a hardware store sells rolls of thick plastic. Another tip to make it extra slippery would be to add dish soap.

Mom Tip: I like to make everything a “game” or “challenge” to keep my oldest interested. It didn’t really matter who finished the obstacle course first, but giving her tasks to complete is also a learning experience. Having ADHD myself, I know how engaging challenges can be and how I can let time slip away from me quickly without even realizing it. Escape Rooms and Obstacle Courses are along the same lines as video games and I have found this extremely effective when learning new topics.

Let me know if you found this helpful! Feel free to follow along for more DIY, life hacks, mom life, mental health, fitness tips and everything in between. 

-The Zombie Mom

 

 

 

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How to Make an Escape Room…Laboratory Style

DIY, Motherhood, Work

Hey guys!

Sorry this has taken me longer to get to than I originally planned, but I hope that you find the information useful. I am attaching a link to my youtube video (first video…sorry I’m awkward) and I will list the steps that I took here as well.

If you work in a lab, you know that lab week is one of the only times we truly feel recognized for what we do. I look forward to lab week every year. With a global pandemic, obviously things have to change. We weren’t going to have food brought to us, we couldn’t have a potluck, and the normal games weren’t an option. I think this year we needed something fun more than ever, which required us to get creative.

 

 

Our shift has done an escape room outside of work more than once. We love them! Escape Rooms are such a great way to promote critical thinking and teamwork.

As a homeschooling mom, I love anything that helps my kids think outside of the box, so I am planning to create something similar for my daughter to help reinforce multiplication facts over the summer.

If you have ever done an escape room, you know that there is a basic storyline and theme.

The best advice I can give you is to stick to your theme.

Do not try to incorporate too much or you will get overwhelmed. In our case, we used Mother Goose nursery rhymes and all clues incorporated a story or character. For example, the first clue tubed down mentioned a Dr. Wolfe (in reference to the Big Bad Wolf). We tubed this down the tube station and then walked down to let our coworkers know what was going on.

The storyline mentioned a patient of Dr. Wolfe’s who turned out to be Humpty Dumpty, and the techs had to work together to figure out what happened with the patient.

We set this up in a way that everyone would have to figure out a strategy together, but they could do this while working since clues were hidden in each department. We tried to utilize clipboards that the techs would look at during specific times (while performing maintenance for example). We placed a logic puzzle on a clipboard in chemistry that would serve as the code for the final combination. Another clue utilized was a pigpen cypher, which was hidden inside of one of the tubes found.

I started thinking of riddles such as

“Mary had a little lamb, its’ fleece was white as snow. Please make sure to run your high control before your low.”

For this particular riddle, this led the tech in Urinalysis to look in the control boxes.

Another riddle used was

“Jack be nimble, Jack be quick. Jack checked for clots with a stir stick.”

For this clue, a tube was hidden inside a box of wooden sticks in Hematology. 

We hid clues in all departments, and the goal was to find all four tubes, which would spell out BANK. Obviously these were blood tubes, so the techs knew to look in blood bank. Once in blood bank, they looked for anything out of place. We place a Mother Goose book on the shelf with procedure manuals, and they used the table of contents along with a Logic Puzzle to crack the final code.

I suggest having a few extra clues, because things will likely not go as planned. In our case, one of our “big clues” was that one of the hidden tubes was tracked. Some of the clues led to a specimen ID where they would find the hidden tube, but one of the techs found this before pricing together the specimen ID. This was no big deal, but I’d suggest having a few extra clues just in case something like this happens.

The final step was to open the locker of the person who helped Humpty Dumpty. The techs solved three math problems to figure out the locker combination. Once they opened the locker, they found a note revealing that they had escaped.

 

If you have any questions, please feel free to comment. Fill out the contact form and follow, and I will send the templates your way :). These can be easily tweaked for a different theme. Thanks for reading!