Well,
Last Friday night Darren and I headed down to Barnes and Noble to join in on the Harry Potter Mania! We did this with our dear friends Margaret & Andrew for book #6 and we were excited to do it again. We wish they were with us! Anyway, they had tons of fun activities - trivia games, crossword puzzles, word searches, guess how many Bertie Bott's beans were in a jar, a magician show, costume prizes, readings from favorite passages, pictures with Harry, free glow-in-the dark glasses... etc. One of the fun things for Darren was to have the "sorting hat" question him and place him in the House of Ravenclaw! (of course he was hoping for Gryffindor) He got to decorate a shield to wear around his neck. He also got to make a bookmark for the about-to-be-released book #7.
Late into the evening we spotted some of the employees wheeling out cases of the books to the front registers. I quickly snapped a shot of Darren with the books. It's pretty serious stuff - they were really edgy about letting me do it but let me anyway. They immediately covered the boxes with a large sheet of some sort. We thought it was funny.
Tons of people were dressed up. One guy made a pretty good Albus Dumbledore. He was kind enough to pose with Darren. Some other good costumes were Fred and George, a Snitch, and Professor Umbridge. We did meet up with a few friends from the ward who were equally excited to receive the final book.
I have finished the book and loved it. Darren is still working on it as we had to share. Over the past few years, we've read all the books together, and separately. We love to discuss them and joke about them. I've enjoyed having this unique experience with my son. I'm so sad there are no more books to look forward to. We'll just have to re-read them again and again until something new comes along. Will there ever be anything as fun as Harry Potter?