Harry Potter Halloween Costumes

We don't always dress up for Halloween, but I thought I'd share our costumes this year because they were book-themed. A friend of ours had a Harry Potter birthday party, so my husband and I dressed up as Tonks and Lupin (because Tonks was the only pregnant character I could think of in the book).

The party was awesome -- we had pumpkin pasties, chocolate frogs (they made them with a candy mold), cockroach clusters (almonds in chocolate), butterbeer and Firewhisky (vanilla cream soda and ginger beer soda - both nonalcoholic so perfect for families and preggos), as well as other treats brought by those of us going to the party. We played Harry Potter pictionary and had a Spell-ing bee, in which we had to spell actual spells from the book, which was difficult, especially since I listened to the books most recently and had no idea how to spell them. When we left, we were given golden eggs filled with cockroach clusters and Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans. Basically, if you want to plan a Harry Potter party, take a leaf from this couple's book, because it was well done and a lot of fun. :)

Unrelated news that I am going to post about in this hodge-podge post -- for the last year or more I have had a YA Friday feature. I generally only posted about YA on Fridays, and tried to have a YA post for every Friday. While I am going to continue to read and post about YA literature, I am no longer going to follow my YA Friday schedule as rigidly. I originally implemented that feature because I felt like I needed to cater to both YA bloggers and those who did not like YA. I felt like the feature showed that I did pay regular attention to YA while also making it clear that it wasn't all I read. I don't really feel the need to delineate that anymore -- I think it is pretty clear that I read quite a few genres. Also, sometimes I've read several YA books and sometimes I'm not in the mood. I have gotten tired of structuring my reading so rigidly and now that I am close to having my baby, I know that reading time is going to get more precious. Thus, I want to spend it reading what I'm in the mood for, not what is next on my blog schedule. I'll keep the link up and will of course continue to label posts for their genre so you can click the label and find more, similar books. Honestly, no one else will probably even notice this, but I wanted to lay it all out for my own processing purposes if nothing else. :)

So in a nutshell, I'm still posting YA, but not just on Fridays, and not every Friday. That's all! Hope you are all having a lovely autumn Sunday evening.