Picket Fence Post

Years after readers of the world excitedly gobbled up the thousands of pages in the seven-book Harry Potter series, I have finally reached that milestone myself.

My twin fourth graders have been obsessed with Harry Potter since 2006, when they plowed through the books during the summer. To date, they’ve read each of the books an untold number of times and their enthusiasm for the subject matter has not waned. Their birthdays were both Harry Potter-themed this year. (I was rather proud of the Sorting Hat I made from paper bags.) The Girl was a character from the series for two Halloweens in a row. (She was Hermione Granger last year, Ginny Weasley this year.) The Eldest Boy was an unnerving Potter doppelganger last year.

Knowing that their mother is an avid reader, they hounded me for quite some time, trying to persuaded me to read the series. This past spring I acquiesced, put aside all my other reading for pleasure and commenced my Potter odyssey. Last week, I finished the gloomy melancholy that is book seven. (Now I get why, at first, The Girl had to put down Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows multiple times in order to “take a break.”) I was shocked by how dark books 5-7 were and was moved to tears more than once. Whenever Harry saw his deceased parents, for example, I teared up.

And, as promised, I’m now making plans to take The Eldest Boy and The Girl out to a nice lunch where we’ll have a Harry Potter book club meeting and discuss all seven volumes. (I decided not to discuss each individual book with them because they, knowing what eventually happens, couldn’t stop themselves from revealing spoilers.) However I’m going to have to go back and refresh my memory about each book as it seems as though a lifetime has passed since I read those first few innocent books.

For those Harry Potter fans out there: What was your favorite book in the series? (Mine is book five, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.) Were you surprised by how dark the series became in its later years?

Image credit: Scholastic.

Item #1: Are Football Parents Nuts?

The Eldest Son plays football, so I suppose, by definition, The Spouse and I would be considered football parents. And, from what I’ve been able to discern, the parents watching their sons play Pop Warner football are no more or less engaged — shouting everything from encouragement and cheers, to criticism and frustration at the refs — than are the soccer parents on the sidelines of The Girl’s soccer matches, or the baseball parents on the sidelines of The Eldest Son and The Youngest Son’s epic baseball games.

But a recent column in the Boston Globe makes football parents out to be a little bit more, oh, what’s the word, crazy, than your average, garden variety sports parent. While writer Chris Bohjalian did say that “parents scream at umpires and referees” at more than just football matches, he penned these observations after watching a middle school football game:

“All of a sudden, an attractive woman sitting near me in capri pants and a fashionable hoodie stands up and bellows, ‘Gut check, boys, gut check! Now’s when you have to stick it to ‘em!’ She is, apparently, a mother of one of the young warriors.

. . . Other parents were screaming at their children to ‘hit ‘em’ or ’stand tall’ or ’show ‘em what you’re made of.’ One grandfatherly looking gentleman in a windbreaker barked, ‘Take it to ‘em boys, take it to ‘em! Pop ‘em! Pop ‘em hard!’”

Wondering what it was about youth football that made parents go berserk, he wrote that the sport “appeals to our usually dormant atavistic core” and that he “left the field that Saturday morning feeling a little bit bloodied.”

And maybe, in some respects, he’s got a point. I know that whenever my kids are physically hit or knocked around while playing sports – whether it’s on the football field or during a soccer match — the mama bear inside me wants to rise up and protect my cubs. But I can’t. My only hope is that the refs and coaches watch out for all the children’s safety and that my kids hold their own against the wretched children who would dare to jostle my kin. Although if I were sitting near the woman Bohjalian described in his column, I likely would’ve rolled my eyes.

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