UEA Weekend 2011

We headed down south to Capitol Reef National Park for one last weekend of sunshine, warm temperatures and hiking. This was our first time visiting Capitol Reef and we quite enjoyed it. Moab will always be our favorite Southern Utah destination, but we'd like to go back to Capitol Reef sometime. Justin's parents joined us from Seattle, for the first part of the weekend. They were just as happy as us to have lots of sunshine! We left Thursday morning and were able to check out the visitor's center and fit in one hike before it got dark.

Blythe is taller than her Gram.

The kids had a blast climbing on all the sandstone.

Barrett found a cozy ledge to rest on.

The next day we did some apple picking in the town of Fruita. It is located inside of Capitol Reef National Park and is now a ghost town. Only a handful of families ever lived there and they were so cut off from the rest of the world that they didn't get electricity until the late 1960's!

Justin picking some golden delicious apples.

Brynne trying her hand at apple picking.

Success!

The orchard was full of very tame deer who
were also enjoying the apples.

The kids at the orchard.

Another shot with the cliffs in the background.

After the apple picking we split up. Justin's parents
and Blythe took a more strenuous hike that had some exposure
and drop offs.I decided that it would be best if Barrett didn't go
on that hike, since he had already been scaring me by running
around the edgesof cliffs. Justin, Brynne, Barrett and
I took a very pleasant hike with zero elevation gain.

Barrett running around in a safe place.

Brynne found the perfect niche.

Barrett in action.

A strange polka dotted outcropping of rock.

Barrett high up on a ledge, if you look
closely you can see Brynne's hand as she
climbs up to join him.

Peek a boo!

Fall in Capitol Reef.

We then drove over to Goblin Valley State Park. Justin has
grown up hearing stories about his Dad playing hide
and go seek among the hoo-doos so we thought we'd try it.

Climbing up a ridge.

View of the hoo-doos from the ridge.

More hoo-doos.

Justin had his GPS with him so we did a geo-cache
first off. It took us way over to the far side of the valley.

Brynne pulling the geo-cache from it's hiding place.

Justin on top of a hoo-doo.

We waited until the sun started to set before beginning
hide and go seek. We wanted the shadows to be longer.
The kids had a great time and all of the adults eventually
joined in too. We had to drag them out of the park,
but we had a long drive to Moab ahead of us.

On the way to Moab we stopped in Green River for
dinner at Ray's Tavern. Just outside of Green River a bird flew
right into our windshield. Justin thought it was a seagulll,
but I was pretty sure I'd seen the face of an owl smack into
the windshield in front of my face. As we recovered from the
surprise, Justin said "I hope it didn't hit my parents car."
I replied, "We have a bike rack on top of the car I
think it's still up there."

So we stopped at a well lit gas station as soon as we
got to Green River and sure enough I was right on both counts.
It was an owl and it was lodged in our bike rack! Justin's dad,
Chuck was the one brave enough to remove the owl.
Luckily there was no blood and it looked like the owl had broken
it's neck, so hopefully it was quick and painless.

The unfortunate owl.
I tried identifying it after we got home and I think it
might have been a Mexican Spotted Owl, which is
Federally listed as threatened. They live primarily
on the Colorado Plateau, which is where we were.

We spent Saturday through Monday in Moab where we met up with my parents and all four dogs. Unfortunately, I didn't take any more photos the rest of the weekend. But we had fun hiking to Corona Arch and in Arches National Park, biking to the "music park", and stargazing on the Slickrock Trail. The kids even did a little swimming, but it wasn't warm enough for the rest of us. Blythe was happy to have two driving lessons from my Dad. It snowed the day after we came home, so we were very glad we'd gotten in lots of sunshine and outdoor activity.

Blythe's Surprise Harry Potter 13th Birthday Party

The tradition in our family has been that the kids get birthday parties on their even birthdays, and on their odd birthdays they get to take a friend out to dinner. So this year was supposed to be an off year for Blythe. However, about a month before Blythe's birthday Brynne had the idea that it would be really fun to have a Harry Potter surprise party for Blythe. It took some convincing on her part, but I really couldn't say no. The timing was too perfect with the last movie coming out this past summer and Blythe recently finishing reading all the books herself. All three of my kids had already decided to be HP characters for Halloween. Blythe chose Bellatrix Lestrange, Brynne chose Prof. Trelawney and Barrett wanted to be Harry Potter of course!

We planned the party for Saturday October 15th, which worked out perfectly because Blythe and some of her friends had been hired to help run games at a carnival as part of a birthday party for an 8 year old girl. This meant she would be out of the house for a few hours prior to the party.

I ended up having a lot of fun preparing for the party. I found a blog at myharrypotterparty.blogspot.com that gave me some great ideas. That lady really went all out. I didn't go quite so crazy. I had a lot of help from my Mom. I was able to store everything at her house to help keep everything a surprise and she found the recipes for and then baked all the desserts, but more on those later. I also had help from Brittney, Hannah and Brynne with the decorations on the day of the party.

The dining room table all set for dinner.

Brynne, the party's instigator, dressed as a Hogwarts student.

Blythe's friends hiding while they wait for her to make her entrance.

More friends hiding.
I asked the girls to come in costume as their favorite character from Harry Potter. Most came as Hogwarts students, but one came dressed as Lord Voldemort and another came dressed as Dobby in an oversized white t-shirt and white socks. Very clever!

Blythe VERY surprised.

Still reacting to everyone jumping out.

Now just standing in shock taking everything in.

One of the ideas I took from the blog I mentioned above was creating H0neydukes, the candy shop that the Hogwarts students visit in the village of Hogsmeade. I turned my Butler's Pantry into the candy shop and at the end of the party the girls got to "shop" two at a time.

The candy counter with bags with the Honeydukes logo on them ready to hold lots of sweets.

Brittney hand created all of the labels for me.

The jar with the yellow candy is lemon drops and I repackaged them with labels saying Dumbledore's Lemon Drops. I got a big jar of jelly beans from Sam's Club and put them in individual bags and Britt wrote Bertie Botts' Every Flavour Beans on the jar. Another favorite of mine was the "Blood Pops." I bought 3 bags of Tootsie Pops and took the wrappers off all of the red ones and re-wrapped them in clear cellophane. The green box on the left has chocolate frogs in it. I don't have a photo on here of them, but my Mom also made "Cockroach Clusters" out of sugared sliced almonds covered in either dark or milk chocolate. They were by far my favorite! We came up with our version of Cockroach Clusters before a recipe showed up for them on bakingdom.com.

These golden snitches are actually Ferrero Rocher chocolates with gold vellum wings. My Mom amazingly drew the wings free hand and then I cut them all out. I forgot to take them out of the paper cups before taking the photo. But they turned out perfectly! We used a few as table decorations too.

No Harry Potter party would be complete without pumpkin juice. I was fortunate to be able to borrow the perfect goblets from Justin's Aunt Robyn. About half of the girls actually drank the pumpkin juice and all of them asked for water to drink also. I served Shepherd's Pie for dinner, but forgot to take a photo of it. It was the most authentic meal I could think of that I thought most of the girls would actually eat. I mean would any 12 or 13 year old year even taste Steak and Kidney pie? I didn't think so!

Some of the party guests admiring the desserts.

My Mom found a blog called bakingdom.com that has all sorts of Harry Potter inspired recipes. We had been wanting an excuse to try some of these recipes, so Blythe's party was the perfect reason. We decided the chocolate Cauldron cakes were a must because Blythe LOVES chocolate. We had to have the treacle tarts because those are Harry Potter's favorite dessert and my Mom insisted on the Honeydukes Candyfloss cupcakes because they were just so cute. I also decided to make pumpkin pasties, which were less cute, but tastier than the cupcakes which didn't have much flavor.

Close up of the cupcakes and yes, we made the tulle pom-poms ourselves. There are instructions on the bakingdom blog, but my Mom figured out an even better way to make them. If you are dying to know how she did it you'll have to talk to her, because I have no idea.

The cauldron cakes which amazingly tasted even better than they looked. My Mom had to order a special hemisphere pan to bake the bases in. The potion inside the cauldron is supposed to be Felix Felicis and is made by brushing gold luster dust over the frosting.

I served the pumpkin juice with dinner and butterbeer with dessert. This recipe is also from bakingdom.com. I was more surprised that many of the girls didn't drink the butterbeer. About half of the mugs looked like they hadn't been touched by the end of the party. I found the perfect mugs at Taipan Trading in Salt Lake for $2 each. I now have a set of 15 matching glass mugs. My mom found a website where someone had etched the word Butterbeer on their glass mugs, but we didn't have the time or energy to that ourselves. It would have been cute though.

The one shot I got of all the girls together.

Blythe with a candle in her cauldron cake waiting for everyone to sing Happy Birthday.

Blowing out her candle.

The beautiful birthday girl with her Mom.

Blythe ran upstairs and changed into her Bellatrix costume after she recovered from the surprise. I dressed up as a Hogwarts teacher. I wore a black blouse, skirt, boots and a silver brooch I already owned. I bought the hat at Taipan Trading and borrowed the graduation robe from Justin's aunt. My Mom had given Blythe her black skirt as an early birthday present and we found the rest of her costume at Desert Industries, which is a thrift store. I was amazed that we were able to find boots that fit her since her feet are a women's size 10.5.

In case anyone is interested in the rest of the party. I created a word scramble with words from the Harry Potter books for the girls to work on while they waited for Blythe to arrive. While she was changing I handed out a wand to any girl who hadn't brought one. (A bamboo chopstick that my Mom found at the grocery store). After she came back down we played a game where I pinned the name of a character on each girl's back and they had to figure out who it was by asking yes or no questions. Blythe was the last to figure out wh0 she was, which was Lily Potter. This was a good ice breaker. Then I gave the girls one minute to write down all the spells that they could think of. I should have given them a little bit longer.

I was surprised at the number of girls who knew next to nothing about Harry Potter. I didn't expect that they would have all read the books, but I thought that most would have seen all the movies, or at least some of the movies. This made my next activity a bit more challenging. I had prepared a trivia contest. I had borrowed two bells (or dingers) from a friend and I divided the girls into two teams making sure that they were evenly divided. I then tried to make sure that the girls who had read the books were pitted against each other, while the girls who were less familiar with the books competed against each other. This meant that instead of just going down my list of 100 questions in order I had to pick and choose as I went, but it worked out just fine. The girls seemed to have fun and each girl got at least one question right.

After the trivia game we served dinner which was Shepherd's Pie, pumpkin pasties, green peas and pumpkin juice. I should have planned to serve rolls or french bread, because I had several of the girls ask for slices of bread.

Then I brought out my box of authentic Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans that my friend Alison Russell gave me and had each girl take a turn tasting one. Each color of jellybean has two different flavors a normal tasting one and a nasty one. The girls who kept getting the good ones were disappointed and kept eating them until everyone had tasted a gross one. I had several plastic bowls on hand for the girls to spit the gross jellybeans into. Some girls were brave and actually swallowed them. I was not brave enough to sample one myself.

Then we had Blythe open her presents while everyone recovered from the Bertie Bott's beans before eating dessert. After we sang Happy Birthday to Blythe and everyone had their fill of cake I took the girls two at a time to "Honeydukes" and explained what all the candy was before having them choose what they wanted. Then we put on the DVD of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I for the girls to watch until they were picked up. Overall, it was a lot of fun and I think Blythe felt loved.