Coming up for air

We spent the day today reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows together. Does that sound silly, reading it together? We started this journey together, reading the books out loud to David when he was 6, and so we wanted to finish the journey together, sharing the humor and the tragedies and the triumphs (hopefully) as the book revealed itself to us. So, we spent most of the day passing the book around, taking turns reading, with breaks for meals and other necessities. It's been a wonderful day, and we're enjoying the book so far.

The party last night at the The Red Canoe bookstore was a lot of fun. They 'sorted' the kids (of course) and had various classes. My favorite was divination, where we voted on various predictions (Will Harry die? etc) and then the kids used a crystal ball (a magic 8 ball wrapped in foil) to find out the answer.

But the best part of the evening was shortly before midnight when they led us out the front door of the bookstore and around the back, to the closed warehouse doors. At midnight, they asked us to all cast the Accio spell to summon the books. As we all shouted Accio together, the warehouse doors rolled up and they pushed out a table with the books artistically stacked on them. It was a fun way to present the books. Then we queued up to present our prepaid vouchers at the table and get our books!