Happy Birthday, Harry Potter

July 31 is Harry Potter's Birthday. The character turned 40 this year. Busy day for us.
I made bean dip for lunch. Oh, did I fail to mention July 31 is also National Avocado Day?

Nichole helped me figure out our menu plan and treats since she's a bigger Harry Potter fan than I and can think of more obscure references to food in the books.

Nichole: There are bananas, potato chips and sausages because in the 1st book at the island with the shack Uncle Vernon made them eat bananas and potato chips for dinner. Then Hagrid came and cooked sausages for Harry and gave him his birthday cake. In the 6th book, Ron and Harry are cutting vegetables, so we can have carrots. Butterbeer, jelly beans and chocolate frogs are pretty obvious in their reasoning. I can't remember a specific bread reference, but I like bread, so... Dobby shut his ears in the oven? Mrs. Weasley gave Harry lots of toast when he came to visit? Amos Diggory was given toast when his head appeared in the fire and he warned Mr. Weasley about Mad-Eye Moody.

Thanks, Nichole.

A few of us also made wands and we all participated in an online Harry Potter trivia game put on by Orem Public Library. They've been having Harry Potter activities all the month of July and this was the final on Harry Potter's birthday. The team we were playing for won.

We had fun putting on a big Harry Potter Birthday Party for Nichole back in 2017.
This July, my sister's family put on a big Harry Potter party (with social distancing) for my nephew. See what they did on her blog, Finding Time to Create. It's pretty awesome.

What We Did for Our Daughter's Birthday

This year Nichole got a big birthday party where she got to invite friends and have lots of fun.
She wanted a Harry Potter theme so we went with it.  We had more planned than we had time for but I'll let you know what we did get to.

The kids got to make their own wands.  Jeremy prepared pieces of dowels.  The kids could then use hot glue guns (we figured this age group could be safe with hot glue- we wouldn't do this with 4-year olds) to create the handle, then paint the wand, add embellishments if they wanted (stick-on jewels), and later when it was dried they could wipe it with a shiny varnish.

We had Quibbler Mad Libs for the kids to fill out.

Jeremy set up a quidditch pitch with goals and the kids were able to play quidditch on brooms.

Of course there was birthday cake.  Jeremy baked it 'imself, words and all.

When he picked up candles at the store, he didn't realize they were the relighting kind.  It was pretty windy while we were trying to light the candles so we were having a really hard time getting them to stay lit in the first place.  Once Nichole blew them out, however, they wouldn't stay out.

Besides cake, we also had a potion to drink (dry ice root beer)

and after presents,

the kids ate Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans and got to open their chocolate frogs and look at their wizard cards (homemade).

It was a good birthday party.