Due to my own life complications, I haven’t written much in OVER A YEAR! Crazy right? Well, let’s get started!
At the end of June 2019, my daughter whose pregnancy I was writing about before turned 9 years old! I couldn’t believe how much time had passed and how much joy I have had watching her grow up! She has turned into an amazing young lady.
We celebrated her 9th birthday by having a Harry Potter Camping Trip Birthday Party! We invited 7 of her friends, so that we could sort them into their own houses.
When asking my daughter what she wanted to do, she mentioned she wanted to have a slumber party. We were living in a small apartment and I knew there was no way I could have that many girls spending the night. My friend suggested we make it a camping trip and that’s how our planning begun!
I looked up all kinds of ideas before settling on our Night in the Forbidden Forest. Since we were camping, it sounded just right! I created invites for my daughter’s friends.
I printed the invites on a hard off-white cardstock paper, rolled them up and tied them with a yellow ribbon. She presented the rolled up “scrolls” to her friends at school and her Girl Scout Meeting. I also gave her, her own scroll for her own invitation.
Once we got to the camp site, we had the girls set up the tents! Learning LIFE SKILLS while they are at a birthday party? Who knew? Several of these girls were already Girl Scouts, so they already had some experience with camping and setting up the camp site. The ones who didn’t, well, they did not complain and they worked as a team to get all the tents together.
After the tents were set up, we labeled each tent. The girls tents each had two Hogwarts houses listed. I brought my sorting hat and we placed 8 pieces of paper (2 of each house) into a hat and allowed the kids to draw their “house” out of the hat. We combined Slytherin and Hufflepuff together, then Gryffindor and Ravenclaw together. We had my son and my daughter’s best friend’s little sister (our house elves) helped with the sorting.
Once all the girls were sorted by random draw, they were able to put all their gear into their tents. The reason I decided on doing a random draw because these are all my daughter’s friends and I knew they would all want to be with her and well, that wasn’t possible. A random draw made it so that it was a fair decision. All the girls were happy with this arrangement… except for one, which is why it was needed. You can’t make everyone happy. BUT, by the end of the weekend the girls who were in those tents together had become friends!
After the sorting, we moved onto our first activity which was wand painting. I handmade wands using chopsticks and hot glue. Lots of burned fingers later, I had enough wands for all the girls attending. I bought different kinds of paints and paint brushes so that the girls could do their own wands.
After the wand painting, we decided it was time to do dinner (hotdogs and smores, of course!) and hung around the camp fire. We had a night hike planned for once it was dark. The place we went camping had a nature presentation on Saturday nights so the girls got to hike up to the nature center. I provided them all with little flash lights for the adventure.
At the Nature presentation, they got to sing and dance and eventually touch some creatures! All the girls had a great time just hanging out and checking out all the animals.
The next day was basically a clean up day. I had bought photo booth type signs for pictures and all the kids had a blast taking pictures with those while we were cleaning up the campsite. We did have 2 bee stings, but both girls took it well. I also had my mom make all the kids chocolate frogs to take home with them.
Overall, we all had a very fun time celebrating my daughter’s 9th birthday. It was also my first real time camping and thanks to my daughter’s girl scout troop leader we have had lots more of that experience which I cannot wait to talk about. My daughter’s friends talk about how it was one of the best parties they have been to!
