To celebrate their 25th anniversary (can you believe it’s been that long?!?!), Disney Stores across the country are hosting special in-store events each Saturday during the month of March. Today was the first event, so I decided to take the kids over to see what it was about.

Today’s event was titled “Disney Store Quest” and called on young detectives to search the store for images of Mickey and his friends. When we arrived and checked in with the cast member, she reminded us that today is “Platypus Day” in honor of Perry the Platypus from Phineas and Ferb and offered each of the kids a cardboard fedora to wear. She also explained that pictures of Mickey and his friends were “hidden” around the store and it was our job to find them and decode a secret message based on a word included in each of the character images. She gave us a clue for the location of the first image along with a piece of paper that listed each of the images we were to find and off we went.

While Colorado Princess ran around the store pointing at every princess thing, saying “Oh, I WANT that!”, Colorado Boy and I did our best to find each of the characters and to write down the words that would spell out the “secret message”. It didn’t take us too long – maybe 15 minutes or so, and at the end we were able to tell the cast member what the secret message was and in turn she gave each of the kids a special prize.

Overall, I thought this was a fun event. It was short enough to keep everyone engaged and it was designed so that older kids could do it themselves and younger kids could participate with a little bit of adult help. I thought the prize was pretty neat and I’ve already appropriated one of them to keep for myself We’ll definitely go back for one of the other March events, but I’ll have to make sure to leave my wallet at home next time – we just couldn’t resist a couple of purchases, especially since they were giving away a set of lithographs if you pre-ordered the Muppets movie

For more info on the upcoming 25th anniversary events, head over to the Disney Store website or keep an eye on the offical Disney Store blog, The Buzz.