Harry Potter abounds

I thought I would expound a bit on the Harry Potter book release party that we went to last Friday night.

Jess and Carlos kindly invited Lyle and Keegan and I over to dinner and to discuss the upcoming events in the soon to be released Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows book. Some other friends were supposed to be there later but Lyle and I were the only ones who made it for dinner. Jess and Carlos have three children; two girls and a baby boy. I am always amazed at the noise level with that many children and how despite the chaos how everything is pretty well organized.

The girls thought Keegan was just delightful and amused themselves by giving him kisses and tickling him. Keegan smiled most of the time except for occasionally giving Lyle or me a look that seemed to say "Mom, Dad, exactly what is going on here?" In general Keegan seemed to enjoy watching the girls and enjoy the attention they gave him.

While Lyle watched Keegan, Carlos grilled, and Jess made the remainder of dinner I feed their little baby boy Leo his dinner. It was weird feeding a baby with teeth and he ate everything so fast! Keegan eats well, but he still spits a lot of his food out. The girls were great while we ate dinner, Leo was a little fussy so he went down for a nap. Keegan sat in his bumbo on the table and watched us eat. Jess made a very tasty salad with some yummy hummus. Keegan ended up getting his fingers in the hummus at one point and spent a lot of time trying to grab people's water glasses. Keegan's reach just seems to be getting longer and longer. Dinner went well and then towards its conclusion Katy showed up. It was nice to see her as we hadn't seen her for a while. Leo had woken up from his nap and Keegan was tired. Jess and Carlos were nice enough to let me put Keegan in Leo's crib for a nap and they even found a monitor to set up so I could hear if he started to cry. Keegan in his typical way, went right to sleep.

Shortly after all this it was time for the girls and Leo to go to bed. Keegan was relocated to a pack n play (which he didn't seem to mind that much). I think about 1/2 an hour later everyone under the age of 20 something was asleep. The bedtime for the girls and Leo was a whirl of activity I honestly couldn't follow. I am impressed everyone got to bed so promptly and stayed there :-)

Then all of the adults spent some time talking about the Harry Potter book. Main items of debate were: is Snape good or evil?, who's going to die?, Is Malfoy going to end up good or evil?, Will Valdemort be defeated?, Is Syrius Black really dead?, Is Dumbledore really dead? I won't go over all the discussion because the points were made this and that way. We were split about 50/50 over the Snape issue. The general consensus seemed to be that Malfoy was good. We were split on whether or not Dumbledore and Black are dead. Everyone agreed Valdemort would be defeated. In general most people thought Harry would die or possibly Neville; there was some speculation that Snape would die defeating the dark lord etc, etc.

The other activity was trying to make up naughty words on the alphabet pal. This is a catepillar where you push the legs and it makes the sound of the letter. So you would press 'S', 'H', 'I' and then on the last letter the alphabet pal would giggle and say "oh, that tickles". Interesting that they have software built in to prevent kids (or adults) from doing bad words. They were pretty thorough as we tried quit a while to come up with a bad word that it would let us do. Anyway, wow what an activity :-) Around 11pm Keegan woke up and he played with the alphabet pal for a while . Then we bundled him up in his stroller and walked home with him. Keegan was so cute sitting in his stroller all bundled up; it made his look *so* small. Keegan went back to sleep okay when we got home and we were all tired.

Anyway, we all had lots of fun and it was neat to see Keegan interact with the girls and Leo.

BTW, I started a new blog where I am going to review all of the books that I read. The address for this is www.karissabooks.blogspot.com