Easter in All its Glory!

Adelle loves the Easter Bunny. We believe that Christ was resurrected and we celebrate it on Easter, but Adelle will never let you forget about the Easter Bunny and the Easter egg hunt. She is often the first one up peeking around corners to find eggs. Lydia and Adelle can be especially competitive, and at times you will hear bickering about who saw which egg first. Lydia is maturing though and kept chiding Adelle for taking the "easy" eggs that Violet could reach. In the end all of the eggs are opened and put in our family candy jar anyway, but there must be something glorious to the rattling, plastic eggs filling your very own Easter basket. Grandma Julie gave the girls beautiful and wonderfully colorful outfits again this year. I being the less than stellar daughter still haven't managed to snap a picture of all the girls in their glorious outfits. I did manage to catch this action shot of Adelle in her fashionable garb though. Granted her hair is still pretty slick in this picture.

Violet wandered around in her pajamas finding eggs. We had to keep an eye on her because she liked to pop open the eggs, which would then leak jelly beans everywhere. She has a unique talent for being able to stuff her mouth with oodles of food in a very short amount of time. The poor girl got quite upset that we wouldn't let her enjoy her sugary, colorful morsels.

Lydia was mortified that I was taking pictures of her in her pajamas. The mammoth egg she is carrying is actually from her super Aunt Erica. You can read more about her amazing Easter hunt for the girls here http://jollyrogerlove.blogspot.com/.

The Easter bunny brought peeps for each of the girls, personalized marshmallow eggs, sidewalk chalk for Adelle, an Easter themed rubber duck for Violet, and body wash for Lydia. In their Easter egg hunt the eggs were filled with jelly beans and a few were filled with money. Ahh the smell of sugar. It was a fun day. Later we enjoyed ham, veggies, and I made for the first time....cheesy funeral potatoes. In fact, I will be entering them in the Oates Funeral Potato cook off this Sunday. Wish me luck!

Eggcelent!

The Saturday before Easter the girls and I sat down together to dye eggs. We put down our Christmas tablecloth, got out our dyes, vinegar, boiled the eggs and had some fun!

Don't you just love the trick of coloring the eggs with crayon before dying them. We each enjoyed making our own little patterns and spring scenes.

Lyda recently asked for an early birthday present of a perm. I didn't realize how much it would set us back, but she looks beautiful! If you can believe it she will be turning 12 in June.

Adelle was quite sad when she dented the shell on this egg, but got the great idea to make it into a rocket ship. When she peeled it open there were all sorts of fun patterns on the actual egg.

She has such enthusiasm. Thank heavens the girls and I adore hard boiled eggs. Even Violet is a huge fan. If only they lasted longer in our house!

Musical Friends

Lydia enjoys listening to music on her I-Pod every so often, especially on weekends when we are doing chores. Lydia introduced Violet to her musical world and she was quite fascinated. She wants to listen as much as possible when Lydia has it on and follows her all around. It is pretty funny!

Welcome To Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

Last Saturday we were as close to ready as possible for Adelle's Harry Potter Birthday Party. Adelle got all dressed up in her Hogwarts robes.

The first thing we did when the kids arrived was to sort them into houses. My cell phone was tucked up in a pocket inside the hat (on speaker) and Wes did an amazing job voicing the sorting hat. I wish I would have gotten a picture of Adelle being sorted. She was sorted into Gryffindor. None of the kids were put in Slytherin because as Ron says "There isn't a witch or wizard in Slytherin who hasn't gone bad". The kids were all really excited.

From their the kids were separated into the three different houses and we had classes. I wish I would have been able to take pictures, but I was busy being the Herbology teacher. I was Professor Violette. Lydia was Professor English and taught Ancient Runes. Wes was Professor Snape, the brother to the actual Professor Snape, and taught Potions. It was very busy, but it went pretty well. From there Adelle opened presents. Now when I was a kid growing up small presents were usually exchanged at friend parties. Some of the kids gave pretty big gifts. Adelle got everything from legos, to craft kits, to jewelry and dress up clothes.

She even got some more Littlest Pets to add to her large collection.

Then it was time for her to open our presents. We got her the Beedle the Bard book and some other fun Hogwarts books. We also gave her a Webkinz Owl that looks like Hedwig. She was especially excited about that.

I even picked her up a little Lego set that has Lucias Malfoy, Dobby, and Harry Potter.

The present I was most excited for her to open was a wood wand from Alvian's.

It was pretty exciting!

I was grateful the weather was warm so the kids could eat and play outside. We had pizza and the yummy snitch cake.

After lunch the kids opened their potions to find they had transformed from worms to wonderful butterflies.

Adelle was a little hard to keep occupied at times, but overall she did great. She was eyeing the leftovers at the end despite eating her own goodies.

After everything was done we loaded the kids up with their books, potted pumpkins, runes scroll and their treat bag. We were so tired when it was all done, but everyone seemed to have a good time. I am sure Adelle will remember this party for years to come...well at least I hope :)

The Amazing, Edible, Snitch Cake

We thought it might be fun to have a Snitch Cake, just like Harry Potter got for his 17th birthday. I didn't think I would have quite the time or talent to make one myself. I have a friend though, Stephanie Tomlin Withers, who makes cakes as a hobby. You can find her cake blog here http://circusprojects.blogspot.com/. She decided to take on the challenge of the Snitch Cake. She did a great job and Adelle was really happy to have her special cake! I really liked the Adelle's name with the lighting bolt L's.

She made the inside of the cake Vanilla in Hogwarts colors. Even the wings were edible! It was amazing!!

Preparations for the Big Birthday Party

Well we've been very busy this past week trying to prepare for Adelle's 7th 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!