I Open at the Close

It's a good thing my kids have my husband, Paul, as a parent, or they'd never have any fun.

We gave one of our children a Harry Potter birthday party.  It couldn't have been more precious.

Actually, it could have.  But I said NO!

It started out with the simple statement, "I want to have a Harry Potter party."

One child suggested we could do "Pin the Scar on Harry" as a game.  That was cute, I thought, but how would we get the materials?  My artistic son volunteered to make that game.  I said fine.

We bought HP cups, plates, napkins, and invitations.  We picked up HP glasses and bookmarks for the goody bags.  A son put the first movie up on the TV screen so I could imitate Harry's original invitation to Hogwart's--green ink and all--on the envelopes.  The birthday child and I went around to deliver the invitations.  He had drawn a scar on a piece of tape that he had stuck to his forehead.  And he brought his owl puppet.

The owl carried the invitations in its beak.  When the doors to the unsuspecting muggle homes were opened, the owl screeched and tossed the invitations on the floor.  If the invited party was lucky enough to be present at that moment, it sent her/him scrambling.

Honestly, I thought that was cute enough.

I had no idea what was to follow.

Another day, my husband and I went shopping.  He picked up a clear plastic, openable ball.

"What's that for?" I asked.

"It's a prophecy for the scavenger hunt."

"Scavenger hunt!" I said in shock, imagining thirteen children running all over the neighborhood collecting dozens of items that we would have to a) buy, and b) do things to.

"It's okay," he said, grabbing a ball-shaped cake pan.

"What's that for?"

"The Snitch cake."

"Oh, that's cute," I said, doubtfully, as he started reading cans of edible spray paint.

He pondered over several kinds of circle things, finally settling on some large styrofoam rings, then tested some dowels for their strength.  Quidditch hoops, of course.

"We're playing Quidditch?" I asked.  "How will we teach the kids to fly?"

Most sports games seem complicated to me, but Quidditch seems unnecessarily complicated, and the complications seem pointless.  I did my best to be patient as we stood in an aisle in a craft store while my husband explained Beaters, Bludgers, Quaffles, Seekers, Chasers, and Keepers to me.  "I'll run around holding the Snitch," he assured me.

We rejected four kinds of silver paper as not filmy but not sturdy enough.  My feet started to hurt.  I'd had my own beating, bludgeoning, seeking, chasing, and keeping that morning on my ten-mile run.

"We need poster board," he said.

"What for?"

"The 'Pin the Scar on Harry' game," he reminded me, picking up several more than one sheet.

"You think he'll make that many mistakes?"

"No.  These are for the Platform 9-3/4 sign and the Hogwart's crest."

I should have known.

We headed off to yet another store.  I found out there was also going to be a jelly bean tasting contest.  And tie-coloring.  "We can use that old purple witch's hat for the sorting."

"Wait a minute," I said.  "This party is only an hour-and-a-half long.  We can't reenact all eight movies."

So, a clerk at the craft store got to see marriage in action as I pointed out that he would be leaving for work before the end of the party, and I didn't want to be stuck with six more activities to complete after he left.  And he watched as Paul graciously agreed to scale back his ideas in order to have the ties colored before the children arrived and were sorted.

I loped along behind as Paul hunted at four stores for a ball that could serve as the Snitch, only to find out that it also needed to be painted gold and needed to somehow have wings attached.

"We need gold and silver spray paint?" I asked, incredulously.  "You already got gold paint."

"That's edible.  That's just for the cake," he reminded me.

I'm not sure what we spent more of that day--dollars or hours--hunting for all this stuff.  I was completely exhausted.  To be honest, just the thought of cleaning up the house and yard for a party exhausted me.  Every plan for the actual party added one more level of exhaustion.  To Paul, the cleanup was a minor detail that could be accomplished with the wave of a wand.  His focus was to search the Internet for two hours each night looking up more and more ideas.

I think Paul and my artistic son both secretly wished this was their own birthday party, but they both refocused their envy into an enormous drive to make it the best HP party ever for little brother.

Over the next couple of weeks, my kitchen became full of chocolate frogs and chocolate-dipped pretzel wands.  It became the factory for manufacturing a basilisk fang, a golden egg, a prophecy, the sorcerer's stone, and Salazar Slytherin's locket.  Cups held water for paint--gold paint, silver paint, red paint for bricks.

There were still surprises.  I opened the downstairs refrigerator to find a case of red cream soda.  "What's this?" I asked.

"It's for the butter beer."  This party has allowed Paul to perfect an offhanded, you-should-already-know-this tone.

Butter beer.  I confess, I didn't read any of the HP books and only saw three or four movies.

What else!???  I wanted to both scream and not ask.

When I got up from a Sunday nap to find my husband researching how to make a scary, foamy liquid to go inside the clear plastic ball, I almost snapped.  I grabbed my notebook and called a private meeting.  Paul balked.  "We agreed on a meeting to figure out what activities we would be doing and how long we would run each one," I reminded him.

"I had that meeting last night," he informed me.  "You were too busy."

"You can't have a meeting with me without me," I said.

"I made a list and left it up on the computer."

"When on earth have I had time to be at the computer this weekend?"

"Look.  Here it is," he said, switching windows.

The list read, "Sorting.  Bean-tasting.  Scavenger Hunt.  Quidditch."  THAT was supposedly our meeting.

"See?" he said.  "Four activities, besides presents and cake."  Because presents and cake are just an after-thought at a birthday party.

"You forgot 'Pin the Scar.'"

He added it.

"I need to talk this through and write it all down before I go off on a trip to the end of my rope and don't come back until it's over," I explained.  "I need it all contained on one page and tied down to earth with time frames so that I can handle it.  I'm not planning to say no to everything--I just need to breathe."

We both took deep breaths and talked about the order and the time frames.  I wrote it all down in my notebook.

"I don't want it to be like a police whistle and everyone has to stop having fun because of a schedule," he said.

"I understand.  And I don't want to be running forty-five minutes late when you leave for work," I said.

I used my best social worker skills to acknowledge that both his visionary skills and my practicality skills were useful to give the party shape and balance, and that by working together, we could make this party work from all angles.  It was my best shot.

But the party seemed to continue to privately and secretly grow, behind doors, when I was asleep or at work.  I would just discover things that had not been run by me--for example, that Paul was sanding real wood wands for prizes.  

Just last night, a child came up to me and said that he "needed" to finish a list of all the spells to go into the goody bags. 

"Is your room clean?" I asked.

Paul thought he would be up all night decorating the cake I had baked.  But the cake I had baked would not work for a Golden Snitch cake.  It fell apart.  You see, I'm used to baking cakes for regular parties--parties where the cake doesn't have to balance on an arc or have wings or fly.  So he had to start over from scratch.  I helped him get it baked and then encouraged him to frost it in the morning, because it would need time to cool.  I also successfully suggested that he didn't need to find the white food coloring to make sure the frosting was not off-white (from the vanilla) before he spray-painted it gold.

He listened, and then spent the morning smoothing and smoothing and smoothing frosting over the hemispheres of the orange cake while I washed walls, arranged furniture, and set up for the party.  He had already told me that he still needed to make grooves in the cake and paint it gold.  As time ran out and my stress built, I thought if he kept smoothing the icing much longer, I might grab that can of spray paint and complete the grooves AND spray both him and the cake in one fell swoop.

Then, he announced that it needed to have words on it.

"Really?"  Each revelation appeared in my mind like another hurdle to cross, and I had no idea how.  Paul had ideas how, but not always the time to do them.

"I'm tempted to print it out on paper and just stick it on," he said.  I agreed that sounded better than piping five words on in frosting.  It was almost time for the party.  He typed up the words and printed them out.  I cut them out of the paper.

"It needs to be gold," he said.  We asked our children to find a gold crayon.  They couldn't.  Paul discarded the original words and spray-painted the rest of the paper gold, then left it to dry.

"Please don't run that through my printer," I begged.  "I'll pen them myself."  I used my ancient calligraphy skills to do just that on some of the gold-sprayed paper, then cut the phrase out and stuck it on the gold-painted, grooved, smoothed, rebaked Snitch cake.  Paul stuck the wings in, after running for reinforcing sticks to tape to the silvery wings that were too floppy.

Four of us dove for our cameras.

As the party started, I saw the value in all the many little details that had been realized.  I placed chocolate frogs on the table and let one leap up onto the edge of the cake plate.  We put frogs and wands in the goody bags.  We ran through the activities faster than I had thought we would, and I admitted it was a good thing there were so many.

With Paul's hurried instructions, I filmed him running around with the Snitch ball in the sunshine, being chased by my birthday child.  The silver Quidditch hoops looked nice stuck in the lawn.  The cake was amazing.  The children had fun.  One little girl announced that her ambition in life is to attend the real Hogwart's.

My back ached.  I had missed my run this morning.  But it was a good party.

Paul was the visionary planner.  I was the practical timekeeper.  We tried to have patience with each other's strengths.  We tried to have patience with each other's weaknesses.  We are not the same, and that's good.  I open where he closes; he opens where I close.

We made a child who is magical, and we made a magical birthday party for that child.

And I hope to heaven that I really made a movie of Paul running around with the Golden Snitch, because I want to remember that image forever, and that though I tried to capture it, it still flew.