Potter Finale

Today was the finale of our Harry Potter weekend. We started our morning by taking the boys to their swimming lessons. (I do love that even though we had a movie marathon weekend, both boys were physically active a bit, so at least it wasn't total sloth-state.)

After returning from lessons, I set off to make the brunch dish. I found a recipe that fashioned itself the Burrow Breakfast Casserole.

For those not familiar with HP, The Burrow is the home of Harry's best friend Ron. It was reminiscent of the egg bakes my mom made when I was younger. I also had to balance the laundry today since Sunday is always my laundering day. But once I got that started, we settled in to watch Half-Blood Prince. This just happens to be the book K and I are reading right now, so it was interesting to make comparisons to the book (let's be honest we'd been doing that all weekend, but it was especially easy with this one.)

Part-way through the movie, my sister and her family stopped by, so we put the movie on hold and the boys got to enjoy some cousin-playing time. It's always fun to see how they interact and who doesn't want to enjoy some adult conversation on a lovely Sunday afternoon. It also gave me a bit of time to clean up some of the kitchen mess and keep laundry on track.

Once our special guests made their departure, we went back to the movies. We snacked a little bit during Deathly Hallows Pt. 1. So, no special Harry fare for that one. We had plans to make a lovely Shepherd's Pie for dinner as we watched the final movie ... but instead we decided to go movie traditional instead of Harry Potter traditional and our dinner was:

It's whole grain rights? We went truly movie-style with butter and salt and watched the last movie theater-style in the dark, too.

While the weekend wasn't necessarily the model for healthy-living, what with K's very first sip of soda and ending with popcorn for dinner ... it was a great weekend of escapism, fun and just hanging out together as a family. I mean, that's what it was from start to finish, just pure family time. We were at home, we talked about the movies together, we shared laughs and snuggled under blankets. It was the kind of weekend that I wish I could bottle up. While O is too young to probably remember this, I hope it's one of those memories that K will get to keep and think back fondly of when he's older.

And I know D liked it, while he thanked me more than once for the weekend, when he asked K how he liked the weekend I overheard him say wistfully, there aren't a lot of other movies that we can do marathon's like this. I then heard K suggest, well, we can just have a movie marathon weekend of movies we like.

Since this type of weekend is something I can only condone when it's cold outside and we want to stay snuggled in, I guess I will now have a new reason to look forward to winter in the future.