Crabapple Farm: Invitation to "Sweethearts"

Ah Yes, another girl's choice dance - where girls are delighted and boys become very wary.

It is traditional to ask your date in a creative way, so Braeburn came home from school last week quite confused. He asked if I had been part of any plot? I said no and what was going on? He said he found all these strange words in his lunch and could not figure them out. He and his buddies had spent the whole lunch hour piecing together word strips that said things like, "pan" "man" "sink" "car" "if" "when" etc. They couldn't figure it out.

Then I remembered that we had been playing a game with Granny Smith's spelling words and had cut them up into strips and put them in a brown lunch sack to draw from. When the game was over, I had just folded the sack up and put it away. Then that morning, I had packed Braeburn's lunch in it. He and his buddies were trying to decipher spelling words into a message. One of Braeburn's friends had suggested they input all the words into the computer and graph out any similarities to see if they could figure out something, anything!

So that was a dry run, and everyone relaxed. But the next day he came home with a Garfield puzzle. He and Golden Delicious put the puzzle together and then flipped it over. On the back of each piece was a scripture reference. For instance, "2 Nephi 18:2, letter 7". Here they are trying to figure out the message.

After a long time Braeburn's part said, "Iesteao..." But luckily Golden Delicious had "February fifth, go to the dance..."

The suspense was killing Braeburn so he skipped to the end where we figured the girl had signed her name. It was a 3 letter word. The first letter was "S". I said do you know a girl named Sue? Braeburn said, no, but he did know a girl who's name started with S and this could be ok. So we pressed on, and finally had the whole message:

"Instead of Puzzling over what you are doing February Fifth, go to the Dance with Sam."

Braeburn was happy because Sam is a very nice and cute and he answered her back with some Europe through the Back Door book. He also helped his friend, Spencer, answer his date too. That involved going and getting a large refrigerator box and putting it on her porch in the middle of the night.