Emily and I have been reading Harry Potter over the last year or so. She never really wanted to read chapter books but has an incredible love of dragons and that's how I hooked her. And once she was hooked she was HOOKED. We ploughed through the first four books. That's over a thousand pages and she loved every story and wants to keep going. I'm worried that the themes are getting a little too mature so we are going to head over to Narnia for a while but to celebrate her love of Hogwarts she wanted her 7th birthday to have a Harry Potter theme and we went ALL OUT.
We spent weeks crafting. We made wands and a Platform 9 3/4. We painted the windows and made special invitations. We figured out how to make the Honeydukes candies and so we made Chocolate Frogs and Every Flavoured Beans. We figured out how to make floating candles in the dining room and our friend Andrea helped us wit that. I did a LOT of work with the glue gun. There was heavy reliance on Pinterest (how did people parent without Pinterest?) We had Golden Snitch cupcakes!
My mom made Emily and I robes and I had sorted out that our house was the perfect place to recreate Hogwarts so that's why we had the party at home. We put the Platform 9 3/4 wall outside the porch door and you had to sneak through the slit in it. The "Hogwarts Express" (the childhood train set) was set up in the front porch and the front door was the entrance to Hogwarts. We enlisted our friends Katie and Adrian to help fill out the faculty. They were amazing sports and came in costume.
When the kids arrived I acted as their headmistress Rowena Ravenclaw and welcomed them as our new early first year class. They printed their name tags and chose their wands. We explained that I would take them around to their various classes before the banquet in the Great Hall. The first class was Potions with Professor Snape (Keith).
Potions class was essentially fun and exploding science. Professor Snape had labeled all his ingredients with Hogwarts names (Bezoars and Wolfsbane and Dragon Eggs, etc). He made "Dragon's Toothpaste" (common name in science experiments is Elephant Toothpaste) and had it erupt in his clear cauldron (punchbowl). That experiment was cool but not as explosive as we were hoping. He had an encore however. His favourite experiment is putting Mentos (Dragon Eggs) into soda pop (Giggle Juice) and that caused an eruption that hit the kitchen ceiling and elicited 7 year old squeals of delight.
Next was Divination class with Professor Trelawney (Katie) up in the loft. She had combed her beautiful hair out big and had lots of scarves and colours and indeed it was the perfect set up for Divination class. She did a great job of pretending to predict every kid's fortune. Again thanks to Pinterest I had found a Divination potion where you put food colouring at the bottom of each glass and covered it with ice and so when you added 7 up the colour of your fortune was revealed! She was perfect.
Our last class before the Great Feast was Care of Magical Creatures. Our Head Hufflepuff girl Adrian and Hagrid's assistant Cian (complete with elaborate dragon "tattoo") taught the kids how to pin the fire back on the dragon. Beware of the Baby Dragon though he is very tricky! He likes to escape and roar loudly :)
We then had our Grand Feast. We had pretend jugs of pumpkin juice and butter beer but served water and pink juice instead. There were "Hufflepuffs" (cheese puffs) and "Slytherin Snakes" (gummy worms) and Professor Sprouts vegetables. They had their cupcakes and chocolate frogs and then went to play around the castle before their parents picked them up. We even had Quidditch painted on the back window for those who wanted to try.
Everyone was sent home with their very own (helium balloon) owl from the owlery, their wand and a container of Every Flavour Beans. It was everything Emily hoped it would be and we had a lovely faculty dinner afterwards of amazing Indian food from Charisma. The house elves didn't have to do a thing. It was a lot of fun to plan this with her and to have it all go so well. Her friend Abigail who has started to read the books too told her mom our house was EXACTLY like Hogwarts. :).
