Well we've been very busy this past week trying to prepare for Adelle's 7
th Birthday Party. All of the fun and mayhem may have gone to her head a bit, but overall I think we all had a very fun time. We planned for the kids to have their own Hogwarts experience. We planned for them to be sorted into houses and to go to three different classes:
Herbology, Potions, and Ancient Runes. Wes wanted to have a little experiment for potions class with
doxy eggs (
mentos) and soda. He wanted to make sure it would work so he practiced the day before. If you've ever seen
Mythbusters before you will probably know what that is all about. You take a 2 litre of soda,

Drop in some
doxy eggs (
mentos) and run for your life.

Here is the end result.

I wanted to make some Harry Potter treats, especially chocolate frogs. Of course I couldn't enchant mine to hop, but I could make them tasty. I found a candy frog mold online at Amazon and bought some Wilton candy melts.

The process was pretty simple. I started making them on Wednesday and kept making them throughout the week. You pour the melted chocolate into the mold and refrigerate them for 20 minutes or so.

The end result is beautiful, shiny, chocolate frogs.

Since I had bought so much chocolate I really thought it would be fun to make chocolate covered pretzel wands. I bought pretzel rods and used various types of sprinkles.

I even took an extra jar we had around the house and
labeled it for the party.

Since we would be serving cake at the party I decided to have the kids take their treats home at the end of everything. I even picked up some gourmet jelly beans with all sorts of flavors, sure they didn't have the vomit or booger flavored ones, but I didn't think the kids would mind.

We couldn't sort the kids into houses without a sorting hat. Instead of buying one we made a hat out of poster board and covered it with leather scraps. We had tons of extra leather on hand because Wes has done various projects with leather, including his
Aragorn costume a few years ago. Wes used
Elmer's glue to stick on the leather. I was sure it wouldn't be strong enough, but to my surprise it was.

The end result was wonderful! We even affixed a little, leather pouch inside the tip of the hat so we could slip my cell phone in it on speaker for a special trick.

Wes had more preparations for potions class. The night before he made several batches of jello and put them in small containers. He had something special planned. When they were set up he placed a gummy butterfly on top of the jello. The plan was to have the kids make a special potion in their class (jello) and to place a gummy worm in the potion. Later they got a container back with a gummy butterfly. Many of them believed that they had magically transformed!

We made special potions jars for the gummy worms, potion powder (jello powder), and
doxy eggs (
mentos). We borrowed a book from the library, Harry Potter Film Wizardry, and we were able to copy some of the
labels for the jars.

We decorated the living room with crepe paper. We made sure to use
Gryffindor colors.

We printed off the Hogwarts House Crests and more pictures from the Film
Wizardry book and began to transform our little house.

We made "The Standard Book of Spells-Grade 1".

One the first page the kids got to circle which house they were sorted into.

There was a page for
Herbology 101. We planned to plant jack-O-lanterns (pumpkins).

We also had an Ancient Runes page. Funny enough we actually used some Tolkien dwarf runes.

Wes filled up pages for his potions class and the experiments he had planned.

Everything was as ready as it could be before the kids came over. Wes, Lydia and I even dressed up as
professors in cloaks. Adelle couldn't wait!