Halloween and Harry Potter Forbidden Forest

I’m loving these family themed Halloween costumes we’ve done for the past two years! Ellis started it with wanting to be Hermione Granger, and then convinced her brothers to be Ron Weasley and Harry Potter!

I helped organized our first annual Halloween gathering for our awesome neighborhood!

It was chaos trying to get their by 5:30 for the big picture, but bonus was we were done trick or treating way earlier this year!

Before the majority of their costumes came off….

…and after!

The Moms…

The Dads…

And don’t worry that’s a fake baby in the carrier, lol. It looks so realistic though doesn’t it?!? Apparently he was a character from then new Spider Man movie.

Shep and Ellis’ AMAZING dyslexia teacher, Mrs. Marr, who also happens to live on our street!!!

We ended the night in Nancy’s garage. Eating chili and watching the World Series!

No costume for me this year, but I guess I kind of looked like a burglar too, lol…

Brooks’ temporary hair dye ended up all over his hands and face, and he broke his awesome wand, but all in all it was a super fun and successful night!!

The next day Shep had his 8 year check up, and they just so happened to put us in the Harry Potter room!

I just love this goofball and all of his silly faces!

We found out they were putting on this temporary Harry Potter Forbidden Forest Experience near our house, so of course we had to buy tickets to check it out!

The tickets were pretty pricey and we had no idea what to expect, so Daddy decided to sit this one out. He’s not a big Harry Potter fan like the rest of us anyways, but man did he miss out! It was WAY cooler than we ever could’ve imagined and definitely worth the money!

The “experience” was set up in a park in Little Elm (about 30ish minutes from us), that has this awesome mile(ish) long trail loop through the “forest”. They did such an incredible job with all the lights and little details along the trail…

Hargrid!!!

Owls were set up in the trees all along the trail…

Pretty sure this is Hedwig (Harry Potters owl)…

Ellis’ good friend Maddy and her mom, Cherie (my good friend), are HP super fans too, so they joined us!

Buckbeak, the Hippogriff!

The kids had to bow to him to see what he would do…

Walking through a ginormous spider web…

A ginormous spider!

I love how cool all the effects were and how clear everything sounded through the speakers!

This isn’t a good picture, but these were floating lights that moved! I couldn’t figure out how in the world they did this!

A Dementor!

Poor little kid in front of us was terrified! This was legit scary!

Mushroom field!

Using their wands to cast spells! I think Brooks pointed his wand at every single thing and yelled, “AWOO WOO WOO WOO” all night long, lol!

Fighting off the Dementors with the Expecto Petronum spell…

The Weasley’s magical flying car….

Giant!

We almost missed this unicorn walking through the forest…

Battle of the wands!!!

Lumos spell to turn on the lanterns!

Of course we had to try the “Butter Beer” (soda with butterscotch) at the end, and of course the kids didn’t like theirs, but as you can see, I didn’t mind! I thought it was delicious!

Such a cool and fun experience for us Harry Potter nerds! It was absolutely worth every penny and the 11pm bed time on a school night!!!