Heather’s birthday adventure this year was Valheim themed. Valheim being a video game she, Corinne, and I have been playing together lately since the 1.0 release.
She was welcomed by Hugin the raven and instructed to earn the affection of one of the wild creatures of this realm. This Hugin was a 3D-printed model which I tweaked to give the feathers a feathery texture. Other than being far too small for a raven, it came out well.
She had to gather wood to create a hammer, then (with the aid of a glue gun) a workbench, and then fencing. With the fencing she could make a pen and lure a wild boar into the pen to tame it. The wild boar was a boar shell I made for my old remote-control car which Jess painted. I’m pretty pleased without how it turned out and the delight of the unexpected it produced. I can say quite confidently that when I bought that car in middle school I never anticipated using it as a wild boar for my daughter’s birthday.
She needed carrots as a lure which she harvested from the planter box (we did not grow the carrots, I “planted” store-bought carrots for this purpose). In the game, once a boar is tamed you can pet it and the game will display, “Boar Loves You!” on the screen. So that was the message she got upon completing her quest. And we gave her a shirt with that message on it too. She seemed rather pleased with the whole thing.
After her adventure she opened gifts; which included alcohol markers and drawing pads which she requested. The paper is thick enough that the marker doesn’t bleed through! (She’s very excited about that.)
After gifts, dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. Home for cake, which was a coconut cheesecake that I made with a blondie crust and chocolate ganache topping. The coconut flavor wasn’t very strong, but the consistency was spot on for all the components.
Thankfully, her birthday was on a Wednesday–which is a short day at school at which she doesn’t have English (which has been a source of massive quantities of homework all year, so none to worry about on her birthday was nice).
The wild boar in action: