WoW Guide to Children's Week achievements

All right, folks, we've got another sub-achievement needed for What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been (and thus the 310% speed Violet Proto-Drake) on our hands here. I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that most of the achievements for Children's Week are fairly straightforward, and should be easy (and even fun) to complete. Appropriately enough for a mini-holiday, most of the achievements are simple, amusing, and not too time-consuming. The bad news is that one of the achievements may be a huge headache to get done, and unlike Noblegarden, your character has to be at least 75 in order to get all of the achievements needed for the year-long meta. UPDATE: shortly before this article is set to go live, we're getting emails from Oceanic players noting that two of the achievements may be bugged. I've included notes on the ones they've indicated, and we'll keep an eye on this tonight.

Children's Week runs from Friday, May 1st at midnight through Thursday, May 7th at 11:59 PM. And -- because we've been getting lots of warnings about this from tipsters, and we thought it was a good point too - please remember that YOU SHOULD NOT TURN IN YOUR ORPHAN WHISTLES UNTIL AFTER YOU HAVE THESE ACHIEVEMENTS. You know how at the end of both the classic and Burning Crusade Children's Week questlines you drop your tot off and get a pet or a payoff? Don't do that. Do the achievements first, and then do the rest of the Children's Week quests, or you'll find yourself without the item/s needed to summon an orphan for most of the following.

UPDATE 11:13 PM EST: Several EU players are reporting that the option to receive an additional orphan whistle is working after handing in the final quest in the Children's Week questlines, so I'm assuming this has been handled and you should be able to finish these without risking the achievements.

Got your kiddo? Let's get cracking.


The meta-achievement is For The Children and rewards the title "Patron" or "Matron" (depending on your character's sex). As you can see, there are only 6 achievements required for this. Most are fairly simple, but one's a potential doozy.

Home Alone

Easy, and the tooltip speaks for itself.

UPDATE: Oceanic players are saying that this may be bugged and that the achievement is disappearing if they log off. I'm still trying to confirm this; can any Oceanic players who have (or haven't) seen this please write in?

UPDATE 11:13 PM EST: Confirmed by several players from both the Oceanic and EU realms. You will get the achievement if you hearth with your orphan out, but apparently it doesn't get saved to you upon logging off. I assume this will be fixed in the new few days, but it's not too big a worry as it's a very easy achievement.

Daily Chores

Again, pretty easy. That said, it does require logging in 5 consecutive days, and Children's Week is just that -- a week. You'll have to start this no later than Sunday (May 3rd). If you find yourself pressed for time over the course of the holiday, you may want to log in and out at the site of an easy and fast daily to complete so you can get this achievement done with a minimum of fuss.

Out of all the dailies available to us now, I think Thrusting Hodir's Spear is probably the fastest to complete on top of requiring minimal travel time to and from the hand-in site, so if you've opened up the Hodir dailies, that's probably your best bet. If you haven't started working on Hodir rep or haven't enabled that particular quest, I'd go for The Way to His Heart from the Kalu'ak, or an Argent Tournament daily that doesn't require travel from the Tournament site.

Edit: There seems to have been some confusion in the comments over what I intended here with these recommendations. I'd just like to clarify that you should be able to get this achievement done with any daily; it doesn't make any difference which one you pick. The reason I've listed these dailies here is that the achievement requires you to log in every day for 5 days in order to get a daily completed with your orphan out, and there are a lot of WoW players who don't typically log in each day, particularly during the work week. My intent is just to provide a few recommendations based on dailies that I've found to be fast, so that you can log in once a day for 5 minutes, get the daily done, and have the achievement done on the 5th day. If you've had better experiences completing other dailies more quickly, feel free to use those; if time isn't an issue for you and you usually have a roster of dailies to get through, drag your orphan through whichever ones you want. The daily doesn't matter, but if you're trying to get this done during the week with serious time constraints, log your toon out at the site of a daily that you know you can get done quickly.

UPDATE: This is the other achievement that Oceanic players have observed is buggy. There's a thread on the forums here giving more information on what's going on. So far the bug has been observed with both BC and Wrath dailies and players are trying to amass a list of which dailies "work" and which don't. I'll keep watching the forums to see how this pans out.

UPDATE 11:13 PM EST: Confirmed by several players from both the Oceanic and EU realms.

UPDATE 2:55 AM EST: Children's Week is now live on my realm and the achievement remains bugged, at least for me. 3 dailies handed in, no credit for any of them.

Bad Example

This will require a little travel and money, but not too much of either:

Tigule and Foror's Strawberry Ice Cream -- During Children's Week two vendors will appear in Orgrimmar and Stormwind (Alowicious Czervik and Emmithue Smails respectively) selling this. Alowicious will be found between Orgrimmar's bank and auction house; Emmithue will be found next to Stormwind's inn. If, for some unaccountable reason, you don't find yourself anywhere near these cities, you can also buy the ice cream from Brivelthwerp at the Shimmering Flats racetrack, or from the Telaar innkeeper/Garadar innkeeper in Nagrand.

The Red Velvet Cupcake, Dalaran Brownie, Dalaran Doughnut, and Lovely Cake Slice are all sold in Dalaran by the NPC Aimee, who is located in front of Dalaran's north bank. Quick note; you don't actually buy the Lovely Cake Slice from her. What you buy is a Lovely Cake, which then becomes cake slices once you set it out and right-click it. As another note, the cake costs 18g (before reputation discounts).

The Tasty Cupcake and Delicious Chocolate Cake are both created by Cooking. The Cupcake recipe requires at least 350 Cooking and is a drop off early Northrend mobs; the Delicious Chocolate Cake is a rare drop from the Cooking dailies (either the ones from BC or the new ones given in Dalaran). The Cupcake is easy to make; the Delicious Chocolate Cake is somewhat more time-consuming. If you're not a cook, make friends with someone who is, or keep an eye on the auction house, although odds are good they'll be expensive.

Hail To The King, Baby

I foresee many Utgarde Pinnacle PuG's with small children in tow this week.

This should be doable on either normal or heroic mode, so if you're not 80 yet or your gear's not up to one of the more difficult heroics, don't sweat it. However, fair warning; your character has to be at least 75 in order to enter Utgarde Pinnacle on normal.

School of Hard Knocks

Nightmare.

This...is not going to be a lot of fun.

School of Hard Knocks requires you to enter the four pre-Wrath battlegrounds and capture/return flags or assault nodes with your orphan out. It may sound simple, but think about the length and frustration factor of the average pugged battleground, and then think about the length and frustration factor of a pugged battleground where your own team's sole concern is beating everyone else to an individual achievement.

This is going to work in one of two ways: either you get these achievements for being close to a captured/returned flag or a captured node, or you have to do it yourself. If it's the former, then this achievement is suddenly a lot less nightmarish. If it's the latter...I really don't know what to tell you that might help. Your best bet is to try to organize a premade (if your guild isn't doing one already), rotate people into flag and node captures, and hope everyone sticks around long enough for everyone to get their achievements done, although this is obviously going to be a tall order by the time you hit the 40-man AV.

I'm looking forward (well, not really) to seeing a series of Warsong Gulches where no one plays offense, Arathi Basins where no one plays defense, Alterac Valleys where no one plays defense, and EOTS where the entire game is a writhing, howling mass of players clustered around the center trying to be the first to click the flag. Oh, and to make things even better, with the huge decline in arena participation and the relative ease of raiding, few players at 80 have serious resilience gear, making it easy for burst DPS on the opposing team to annihilate people in the run for a flag or node.

I return to my previous statement; nightmare.

Aw, Isn't It Cute?

This should be the last achievement you do if you're a new player and don't have any of the previous Children's Week pets, because getting one requires you to hand in your Orphan Whistle.