My nerd is showing.

August 02, 2015

Jayce and I have talked about doing a Harry Potter party for a while and at the beginning of the summer we decided this would be the year! By Harry Potter party, I mean we actually had a birthday party for Harry on his actual birthday. (!)

Can I just say we had a blast with it?! Jayce and I planned it together, we watched the movies in the nights leading up to it together, and we had fun making the decorations together, especially the wands! We felt like putting in the time for the decorations since this will hopefully become an annual event in the Porter household.

The invitations were the first thing we did and they got us pretty excited.

The other decorations came together in the week and a half leading up to the party. There are pictures of those things below. We made some "exploding bonbons" (bonbons with pop rocks) and some pumpkin pasties as well. Our guests also brought yummy Harry Potter treats to share too.

I made the treats the day of and I felt so bad telling the boys over and over again that they weren't for us to eat, so I let them have at it with the leftover bonbon chocolate.

We got everything pretty much set during nap time and then we headed to Costco to run some errands and let the kids wear themselves out at the splash pad. They enjoyed it, especially the part where I brought Costco pizza out to them. Desperate times call for greasy measures sometimes!

Wearing them out didn't work quite like we planned, they were in and out of their beds for the first 45 minutes or so, but it was okay. While we were still in the backyard they snuck out and stole wands out of the vase we had them in! They were playing with them in their beds for a while. After they fell asleep, I pulled the wands out so that they wouldn't roll onto them and get poked or break them in the night. Jack woke up and needed some TLC right when we were getting ready for bed, so we tucked him in again and then right after we got into bed ourselves Jayce heard some scampering feet and an odd sound in the hall. He went to investigate and discovered that Jack had run out there real quick, fumbled in the wand jar and pulled one out to take to bed again. Haha!! That kid.

Here was the party set up:

We added more chairs to this, but Jayce got this real quick before scrambling around to tie up lose ends.

Exploding bonbons, pumpkin pasties, chocolate frogs, and veritaserum to drink! Our friends brought breadsticks, chocolate wands, a pie, and another kind of pumpkin pastie too. I wish I got a picture of the chocolate frogs in their containers (that we folded out of cardstock), but I did get a picture of the inside of the box with a Harry Potter card inside!

The Mirror of Erised.

We also had some Devil's Snare on the mantel piece and Moaning Myrtle on the toilet seat.

The guests came in and got on the Hogwarts Express where we played Harry Potter Headbandz. Basically, we all had different people/places/things from the wizarding world on our foreheads and we had to figure out what card we were wearing by asking yes/no questions to each other. It was a great ice breaker. One friend brought their little baby dressed as Doby!

Then we went inside and talked for a bit while eating the treats and then jumped into Harry Potter Jeopardy, which randomly was just online and ready to go when we started googling game options. It worked out well!

I have to say the highlight of the night for me was when we played a Harry Potter charades-type game. I was almost rolling watching and listening to what people came up with! Out of the whole group only 3 or 4 had read the books, but almost everyone had seen at least a couple of movies. That made the game though. The most hilarious people were the ones that had no idea who was who or what was what in Harry Potter. I was dying! We had a great group show up.

And here they are!

The McCunes:

Kelly (Brack had a prior commitment, but like a true Harry Potter fan Kelly got a babysitter/bewitched a muggle to watch her kids so that she could still come!)