Birthday Board

I like traditions, mostly - I like the continuity, the feeling of belonging and ownership that comes with family traditions. Throughout our year there are a number of small things we do. My husband and I take an anniversary selfie. I decorate a Christmas cake. My husband devours it 😂. On Christmas morning we eat homemade cinnamon scrolls, the boys have a homemade advent calendar each year (sometimes small gifts, other times activities - see more on that here).

On birthdays they get a birthday morning surprise (balloons, streamers, confetti or the like put up after they are asleep), I decorate their breakfast stool. I take a photo of their cake and them with their presents and every year since our oldest turned 4, we have taken a photo with the Birthday Board. It has been such a great way to track both their growth and their favourite things. The photo is usually taken with their sleep toy. I wanted to get rid of the blackboard last year, but decided I should disassemble it and keep the front half for the Birthday Board! Click on an image to see in detail what we record from year to year.

Finn:

 

 

Max:

 

Oh! How my babies have grown!

Captain Finn turns 7!

Wow! I can't believe my youngest is 7!  How is it that days, as you live them, often seem to take forever, but somehow the years zip by in a flash? Childhood seems so fleeting; sometimes I wish I could slow everything down - not Peter-Pan indefinitely - but just keep my wee boys little a bit longer. The days of the boys zooming through the house at 7am for a morning snuggle are numbered, so too the times when they'll want to hold my hand as we walk down the street. While there is a lot to love about watching your children grow and mature, it's still pretty hard to let your babies go...

Birthdays are always special in our house. We start with a birthday morning surprise, which is some kind of decoration I put up once they are asleep in their room or the lounge - streamers, confetti, balloons or the like. This year I hung tissue flowers in the birthday boy's bunk. I also always decorate the stool at the bench where the birthday boy will breakfast, set out breakfast plates, a birthday badge and a small present or two if it's a weekday, as we wait till their dad is home from work to open the real presents. We also take a photo with the birthday board each year, as a way to mark the changes from year to year. More on that here.

As I've mentioned before, the boys have a birthday party every other year. If it's not their turn, we still do someting special with them - dinner or a BBQ with a couple of friends. Max had a Harry Potter party last year, so this year is Finn's year. After much deliberation, Finney decided on a pirate party and I duly started scouring Pinterest for ideas. I'm a much better imitator than a creator, so much of the below is based on other clever people's ideas.

Invitations were designed, scrunched, drenched in tea, burnt, rolled and delivered.

We decorated the house with portholes, an octopus, a treasure chest for the goody bags and created a Pirate Captain:

 

I had a ball with our themed party food:

Driftwood - pretzel sticks
Grilled parrot - chicken wings
Shaking ships - jelly in orange peel on a jelly sea
Ship dogs - hot dogs with sails
Octo-dip - capsicum, veges and dip
Dead man's fingers -  chocolate finger biscuits
Scurvy medicine - fruit kebabs
Fish 'n' chips - potato chips and goldfish crackers
Sea water - lemonade punch

The birthday boy and his guests received pirate names by rolling the dice. 

Captain Long Bandit Finn and his crew spent most of the time playing outside in the pirate ship, walking the plank and searching for treasure.

               

And what party is complete without a birthday cake? Finn asked for a pirate ship on his 4th birthday, so I had to find something different for this one - I went for simple this year!

A Little Hobbit

A few months before Max turned 9 I read him The Hobbit. It was just the right level for him, with the right amount of action and adventure, so that he was immediately taken with it and all things Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. He pestered me non-stop to be allowed to read the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It has been about 20 years since I last read it and I remembered it as enjoyable but so very long and thought it'd probably be quite difficult for a 9-year-old, but decided to let him have a go, expecting him to give up pretty quickly. I also started reading the books again at the same time, so he could ask me questions and talk about them with me. I have really enjoyed them, but am only just now nearing the end of the second book, when Max finished the third several weeks ago! It's amazing how being passionate about something is such a great motivator! 

For his birthday we took him to Hobbiton, where the village scenes in The Hobbit were filmed. That was a magical place - even hubby who is not a Hobbit/LOTR fan enjoyed the tour. Needless to say, Max LOVED it!

Drinks at the Green Dragon. Beer and ginger beer brewed on-site.

For his birthday I even made him a Hobbit hole cake :)

A Harry Potter Birthday

For me, one of the greatest joys of having children is observing their imaginative play and encouraging them to wonder and consider all possibilities. I love that my two still believe in magic, despite so much evidence to the contrary. In spite of innumerable fruitless efforts of conjuring with a wand, of trying but failing to see the tooth fairy, and never stopping to question how their toys wrote on their blackboard, they still believe. They want to believe, so they do.

I love reading to my boys at night - watching their huge, emotional reactions to stories, even those we have read hundreds of times. We have recently started reading the Harry Potter series. We are up to Book 3, The Prisoner of Azkaban, but will leave it there for a few years, as the subsequent books become a lot darker and scarier for youngsters. They have loved the books, as do I. They imagine a world where magic is real, where good triumphs over evil, where baddies always get what is coming to them, where kids can be heroes. Naturally this has spilled over into their play and it has been lovely to watch.

Yesterday Max turned 8 (EIGHT!).  As it was his turn to have a party this year - we decided several years ago that a party every year was too much, so the boys take turns- Max decided on a Harry Potter theme and I was happy to oblige. It is such a magical (ha!) theme and there are so many amazing ideas on the interweb and Pinterest, that I ran with it.

THE INVITATIONS:
Hogwarts letters, train tickets enclosed, were sealed with a crest and sent via Owl.

THE DECORATIONS:
We had spiders, House posters, a daily timetable, potions ready for a class, an Owlery, and Platform 9 3/4 just inside the front door.

THE FOOD: 

We had frankfurter wands, treacle tart, fruit kebabs, mini cheese and pretzel broomsticks, rice krispies, sweet and sour meatballs, chips, buns, and jelly beans. 

The crowd pleaser by far was the Polyjuice Potion, which I forgot to photograph until it was nearly all gone - lemonade (as in Sprite) with lime icecream.

Half of my food ideas and labels came from Just Sweet and Simple. 

THE GOLDEN SNITCH CAKE:

I finally settled on a Golden Snitch cake and procured a hemisphere cake tin. I decided to do a vanilla flavour on the top and my favourite chocolate cake on the bottom and to cover the two halves separately with ganache, joining them together with a buttercream.

I don't have a cake turntable, but after watching YouTube videos on cake decorating, thought they looked particularly useful, so fashioned myself a makeshift one out of Lego, a chopping board and edible glue. It worked really well and I found it a lot easier to work with one, so will buy myself a proper one before the next cake.

I'm still relatively inexperienced with fondant, so the thought of a spherical fondant cake was rather daunting, to say the least. After practicing several times on a large polystyrene ball, I felt confident enough to give it a go. I used a ton of edible gold spray paint and the cake turned out really well, even if the wings ended up drooping under their own weight.

THE ACTIVITIES

After all the guests had arrived we took them on a quick trip to Diagon Alley to visit Madame Malkin's to pick up some robes (PVC tablecloths cut and taped in place, link here) and a wand from Ollivanders. The wands were wrapped in brown paper, because, as we all know, the wand chooses the wizard (less disappointment that way, too!) They also picked up their school supplies (goody bag with all the things they needed for the party).

The kids were sorted into houses in a Sorting Ceremony - a baby monitor was hidden on a shelf behind the child, so it appeared to be the Sorting Hat speaking - it was a lot of fun!

Once they were all in their houses, they decorated their blank ties with felt stripes in their house colours and then had a Charms class, where they learned the pronunciation and wand movements for a few basic spells. They practiced wingardium leviosa by incanting it and using their wands to collectively keep a balloon afloat.

The next class was Care of Magical Creatures: 10 of Hagrid's animals had escaped overnight, so they had to hunt for them outside in the "Forbidden Forest". This took them quite a while and gave us time to get the afternoon tea ready for them to eat.

After the refreshments it was time for the Potions class on the outdoor table. I had 3 experiments prepared, but we only had time for 2. We used small yogurt pottles as cauldrons and iceblock sticks to stir. The kids really enjoyed this class.

I found some neat labels online somewhere and added the names I needed in Photoshop. I used a modified version of the recipes at Mrs Nespy's World.

Basilisk Venom was a solution of dishwashing liquid and water, Dandelion Root was baking soda and food colouring, Leprechaun Tears were red, blue and yellow solutions of food colouring and water, Crushed Dragon Bones was baking soda, Unicorn Milk was normal milk, Spider Eggs were peppercorns, Acromantula Venom Powder was cornflour, Fish Brains were boiled tapioca pearls and Volatile Solution was white vinegar.

Lastly, the young witches and wizards went to Quality Quidditch Supplies, picked out a broomstick and played a haphazard game of Quidditch. I had found a good version of a real-life game, but they weren't so interested in playing by the rules - they loved running around chasing each other and for a good part of the time used the broomsticks as hockey sticks.

I managed to make 12 broomsticks out of 2 fan-shaped straw-brush brooms from the $2 shop, reusing the original tape to tie the broomsticks together.

THE GOODY BAGS

The kids picked up the start of their goody bags early on in Diagon Alley. In it they got their Magic Spells Book, a feather quill to write with, a blank tie ready to decorate, a small card with their house on it (they didn't see it until after the Sorting Ceremony), and an activity book of HP colouring, wordfinds and puzzles (in case it rained and we couldn't do our outside activities). They also got to take home their wand, broomstick and robe.

The quills were craft feathers with the ends of ballpoint pens stuck in them and the wands I made out of quality wooden chopsticks, hot glue and beads of different sizes, painted in different colours.

 All-in-all, it was a lot of work, but worth it, as a fabulous, magical time was had by all!