Harry Potter Halloween

I have wanted to have a Halloween party for a long time now.  I made it happen this year.  I was looking at  traditional Halloween ideas, but suddenly, Harry Potter popped in my mind and we ran with it.  There was a lot of preparation that went into it and for me that is almost more fun than the party itself. I enjoy the creating part of a party.  Garry made these banners for the evening. 

I made the Hogwarts sign after Garry cut out the wood for me.

I decided to do HP themed prizes, so one evening I whipped up some flying keys.

I ordered some owl salt and pepper shakers.

I found a cute owl bowl and filled it with jelly belly's.

I ordered a mold and made some chocolate frogs.

We put them on the food table and wrapped some for prizes along with some edible golden snitches.

We put up the decorations and ended up making 25 golden snitches that we placed around the house.  At the end of the party, we asked the guests to name all the places they saw the snitches.  It was funny because Heather Osburn had noticed them randomly placed at the beginning of the party and she thought to herself that it might be a part of the party, so she started writting down the places that she saw them.  She got 24 out of 25!

One of our games was a jelly belly tasting/ identifying game.  They had to taste and name the flavor.  Jay Shafer won that game. 

As we prepared for the party, we moved some furniture to make more room and found out just how dirty our carpet is!  Yikes!

I made some photo booth props.  We set up a booth I always love doing that.

We delivered invites by owl a couple of weeks before the big day. 

We decorated and set up the kitchen for the food spread, we asked everyone to bring a dessert or appetizer to share. 

I made poly juice potion punch

Wormtails fingers

Aragog's babies

And Dumbledore's pensive which we forgot to put out and so we enjoyed it after the party.

We let everyone randomly pick from the sorting hat to decide their house and they did the trivia games as houses.

We had some fun trying out the photo booth. 

Since we came up with the trivia, we didn't play, but I had fun observing everyone.

Garry did a great job on our costumes.  Moaning Myrtle and Mad Eye Moody had a great time at Hogwarts.

Everyone dressed up and that made it fun and I know I had a great time planning it and attending it.

The big 21

Tanner turned 21 this year.  To the outside world that is usually a big number because you are old enough to legally consume alcohol.   I know that Wal Mart was happy because as a cashier, Tanner is now able to ring up alcohol with out a manager having to come by and do it for him.  So I thought it would be fun (ny) to celebrate his birthday with a drinking theme.  Our first stop however was dinner together as a family.  He chose the Mexican restaurant at the Southpoint.  We all were coming from different spots, so we all attempted to meet up there.  Talon was there first and quickly called us all to tell us it's closed on Monday and Tuesday's.  So we quickly decided on Chili's instead and met up there.  Taz and Cynjyn were coming straight from band practice and Talon was leaving for work immediately afterwards. 

When we got done with dinner, we went home and began the drinking game.  I had gone to Rocket Fizz and picked up 6 odd flavors of soda.  They have hundreds to choose from so it was hard and Garry was with me and we have differing tastes, so we were trying to pick some that we thought Tanner would enjoy. 

We lined them all up and poured a cup for everyone and then they drank it and tried to come up with what flavors were in it. 

Now another thing to know about Tanner is he is a water drinker.  He is usually true to his water and rarely will drink anything else.  So this was a challenge for him. 

But he was a trooper and he ended up liking some of them.  A lot of them tasted like medicine's so that was weird. 

We ended the night with his favorite dessert, Tapioca pudding.

Unfortunatly, Tanner ended up being sick during the night and throwing up all night and was literally in bed with some bug for the next three days.  Oh, and he got a membership to the local rock climbing place and rock climbing gear for his birthday.  Happy Birthday Tanner! You are loved.

Tennis anyone?

Taz decided to do Tennis this year instead of Cross Country. One of his best friends, Ryan had done it last year and convinced Taz he should give it a go. He did pretty good for only having started playing tennis last spring.  He worked hard all summer and he and Ryan were always playing it in their free time.  This season, he played singles and doubles.  He liked singles best, but the coach decided to put him and Gus as doubles partners in the regional tournament at the end of the year.  They lost, but he had a great season and wished he'd done it all 4 years instead of only this year.  I of course took the camera and got a lot of action shots throughout the year.  These are my favorites because they show the many faces of Taz.