“I solemnly swear that I am up to no good!”
My daughter HATES going to sleep. Even at age 8, she will decide bedtime is the perfect time to eat, practice piano, and even get ahead on homework. Seriously? I finally caved telling her she could stay up as long as she wanted as long as she was reading a book. To my surprise, she wanted to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I told her it was too difficult for her. Of course that is the book she now HAD to read. She thought she was being defiant. Really, it was all part of my mischievous plan to turn her into a lifelong reader.
I giggled as my devious plan seemed to work. She fell in love with the books and sped through them. This just started in October, and she is about to start book 7. I started incorporating Harry Potter into a lot of our daily lesson plans–#HomeschoolMom.
Then, the obsession crept into our extracurricular activities. She carries her water bottle wrapped with a custom Felix Felicis label to her volleyball games for liquid luck. Aria also has a Honeydukes tumbler for when we go visit with friends. While there, she tells the same joke on repeat:
“How obsessed am I with Harry Potter on a scale of 1 to 10? ~9 3/4!”
After getting a tummy ache from laughing so hard at her own repetitive joke, she even responds in HP lingo. “Are you sirius? Don’t be riddikiculus! and “What is ron with you?” If you ask her what kind of car she wants for her 16th birthday, she says a Ford Anglia. If we can’t find this Harry Potter flying car, then any vehicle will work, but she prefers it to have a custom paint job with a dragon breathing fire.
She dreams of one day going to London. Instead, we settled with Universal in Orlando. She bought her Luna Lovegood wand at Ollivander’s. Then, she went around casting spells everywhere she could according to the Marauder’s Map. The movie really turned to life strolling down Diagon Alley and riding the Hogwarts Express. We wanted to bring that magic home.
With that in mind, we contacted Leila’s Art Corner, and our entire guest bedroom turned into the inside of the Hogwarts castle with the enchanted ceiling and all.
I can’t put all of the obsession onto my daughter though. It is a contagious addiction that has caught on with our family and friends. We have all sorted ourselves into houses with the sorting hat, and we all go to the movies each time a Harry Potter film makes its way back on the big screen for a special showing. As a friend group, we have even decided that we are all going to dress up as HP characters for Halloween this year.
There are around twenty of us, and we can get pretty creative. I’m currently leaning towards being Fawkes the Phoenix. My husband can’t decide between a mandrake, hippogriff, centaur, or possibly Lupin. He is so torn. Aria wants to be half regular Hermione, and the other half after she drinks the Polyjuice Potion and turns partially into a cat. The Polyjuice Potion will become her trick-or-treat basket.
After she finishes reading Harry Potter, she plans to read all of the other J.K. Rowling books. As a result of this fascination with HP, Aria now reads years above her grade level. However, I do hope that when she wraps up this series that she gets some good, consistent sleep.
“Sleep is good, he said, AND books are better.” ~George R.R. Martin
