HP2

(Posted by Jennifer)

Ahhhh, the bliss of a house with just my family in it. Both Harry Potter parties are behind us now, and we are ready to face the first week of spring (?) with a fresh start. The day feels like spring, too, which is lovely—with bright blue sky and dark black clouds sharing the same space.

Shall I begin by talking about the misadventures? Like borrowing an air mattress and discovering the hole just as the kids were starting their movie. And then wanting to fill it a little with the borrowed pump which attaches to the lighter. But not wanting to run the car (not environmentally sound) and so, instead, running the pump until it turned off. And, er, the car wouldn’t work either. Turns out that’s a bad idea. So there we were, with a dead car perched at the top of a hill at our new house which was devoid of furniture (phone service, etc.) but filled with girls. We hoped and hoped no one would want to go home in the middle of the night (as far as I know, I’m the only one who came really close to going home in the middle of the night…). Or about midnight fights that sent girls to new rooms? Or about Perry (who had the party name “Snuffles” all night) who wanted to sleep closer, closer, closer to us, who kept putting his nose or paw or tail in my ear

Or shall I tell you about the glories of it? There were broomstick races at dusk (backwards) and the creating of “half moon warewolf pies” in potions (they look like muggle pizzas, but are magical). The girls, in full witch regalia, ate the pies with good cheer in a room lit only by candles. They cheerfully endured the team-building exercises I imported into the birthday party (because while I can’t make girls this age be nice to each other all the time, I could give House points for it at the party). And they heaped into the empty lounge and watched the first Harry Potter and laughed and screamed together.

We also had a grip on our foreign-ness. The makers of the “half-moon warewolf pies” were disappointed that there wasn’t bacon or pineapple to put on the pizzas. I could cut up a pineapple fast and put it out, but they were out of luck with the bacon. (But who would have thought that those two were the central pizza toppings for kids? ) One girl was so polite that she happily made the pizza and then sat with it in front of her, never telling us that she hated pizza. And it’s also just a little odd to have ALL of the kids at your party have accents different than yours. “Pier-ry!” they called to the dog, and celebrated that Naomi was now “tin.”

The party was, I think, a total success—or as close to a success as you can get under these circumstances. It turned out that having the party in the new house was a big piece of the delight of it. First, I got to spend a night in that magnificent place (and hear the wind howling—because I was up a lot to be able to hear it). Second, because all the rooms are empty, we could put three girls each in each of the three little bedrooms. That meant that they could have their common rooms (they had divided into Hogwarts houses) and passwords and secret knocks; mostly the girls who didn’t like each other were totally separate from one another. So the fighting was held to a minimum even though there were distinctly different sorts of girls all together. Phew. Now there is room-cleaning to do, I can hardly keep my eyes open, and I have a big chunk of work ahead of me before I can enjoy this magnificent Sunday afternoon. But, the Harry Potter magic held out for a second birthday party, and really, that’s as many sequels as I needed.