The Cursed Child

If you're any sort of a Harry Potter fan at all, you know that J.K. Rowling wrote another book which follows Harry and Ginny's son at Hogwarts.  The book was released on Saturday and Barnes & Noble had a big party from 8:00 to midnight to celebrate the release of the book - although it's not actually a book, it's a play script.  It would make a wonderful book - I've already finished it.  It's a slightly more difficult read because it doesn't tell you how anyone speaks or what they are doing.  In a book, you might read something like,  "Hermione snatched the book out of his hands, marched over to the desk and slammed it down, scattering papers and pencils which rolled off the desk and noisily bounced around on the floor.  She glared at the mess and then back at Ron and snapped, 'Thanks!'"

In a script, that same bit would look something like this:

Hermione:  Thanks!

Movements, expressions, inflections, etc are not in a script.  So it's a more difficult read if you aren't used to scripts.  I however, am very used to scripts, so I'm able to insert (in my mind) the missing bits.

I guarantee you there will be plenty of people who don't like "The Cursed Child" because they don't like the style in which it is written.  But it is an excellent story and will probably be made into a fantastic movie one day.  

In our house, no one geeks out over Harry Potter more than

our Hufflepuff, Emily.

Seriously.

Emily went all out and hand made each of us a hat, badge, and wand.  

Our badges looked like they were embroidered.

Katie was a Ravenclaw.

Emily was a Hufflepuff.

I was a Griffindor.

Although the badges looked embroidered, Emily actually printed out pictures of the badges and then glued embroidery thread to them.  It took her a loooong time but the result was worth it!!

Likewise, our hats took her quite a bit of time.  She worked on these over multiple weekends.  She bought fabric scraps and sewed them together.  She then used interfacing to form the base and glued the fabric over the interfacing.  At the last minute she added flowers and ribbons for a little extra "oomph".

We definitely had oomph!

She also made us these AMAZING wands!

These were actually just rolled up paper.  Emily used a hot glue gun to draw designs on them.  Then she painted them varying shades of brown to make them look like they were made of wood.

My girl is crazy talented!

Those wands were all kinds of useful.

Once we arrived at B&N, we posed for wanted posters.

And visited platform nine and three-quarters.

I don't normally have just one giant boob.  Not sure where the other one got off to.

The girls made Pygmy Puffs!

We played Harry Potter versions of Charades and Taboo.  Emily rocked at all of them.

While we were playing Taboo (Emily was calling out the clues) a teenaged boy materialized next to us and started calling out answers with me and Katie.  After we won, he turned to us and said, "Hi!  I'm Ian.  I'm an extrovert."  We enjoyed him.

Normally, we are fairly introverted.  But all three of us have a streak of extrovert that pops up on occasions like this.  Everywhere we walked in the store, people asked us WHERE we got the hats.  Katie and I would point at Emily and say, "She MADE them!"  And then we would show them our wands and badges and brag about how she made them too.  Everyone was astounded.  We got major ego boosts over the number of people who thought we had purchased them somewhere!