January 26, 2018: Harry Potter Family Day

Friday. It was a busy morning as one person was out of the office today and we just let someone go yesterday so I was helping to cover the shortfall and that kept the morning pretty busy.

The Certificate of Occupancy for our house in Peekskill was issued late this morning after a morning scramble of getting the house unlocked for ConEd to get the power turned back on.  That should be the last real barrier to selling the house.  The buyers are doing an inspection tomorrow and seeing if they want us to clean it out or if they will just take it as it is.  Fingers crossed.  We really want to get this wrapped up.

The girls slept in late, then got right into school.  Dominica did that with them for a few hours but we talked and decided to wrap up school on the early side today and get right into some family time.  It has been a busy, stressful week and we figured that this was just a good idea.  Plus we don’t know how long we are going to have HBO Go, so we need to use our chance to see the movies that we want to see.

So in the late afternoon we settled down and finished the last half of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that we had started last night, and then we watched Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince which we had just finished reading two nights ago.

For dinner, Dominica decided to just make a cake.

After our second movie was finished, Luciana decided that she had had enough of the movies and did not want to watch anymore at night time, because they are a bit intense, and she wanted to save the last ones for tomorrow instead.  But she still wanted to read; so we settled in around seven thirty and I read until half past midnight.  We are now sixteen chapters into Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Luciana asked to sleep in our room last night because she didn’t want to “stop family day” by having to go sleep in their own room.  So the girls stayed with us.  It was a really fun day, getting to spend nearly the entire day together as a family all bundled up in blankets on the Ikea couch in our bedroom.

We will probably finish the Harry Potter movies tomorrow, because we want to be absolutely sure that we get through them all before they are not available to us any more or it will be a big pain.  We own them all on BluRay, but we don’t have a BluRay player anymore (and have not for many years) nor do we know where any of our BluRays are stored (a natural thing to happen when you don’t have a player for a very long time.)

One of the things that has been awesome is going through these movies and both girls constantly pointing out how the movies are so short, so cut, and so modified from the books.  They have been paying unbelievably close attention as we read the books and are acutely aware of every, single discrepancy that happens in the movies.  Luciana especially is appalled by the movies’ lack of accuracy and completeness.  There are so many scenes and events that she wanted to see and they are just gone.

We have spent a lot of time talking about all of the bits that get missed and it is really evident just how enthralled they are with our reading time and how engaged they are with the stories.  It shows how important that time is.  Luciana says how much she prefers the reading time because she gets to “watch all of the story in her head.”