It’s almost 11 a.m. on Saturday, and gorgeous outside. Hazel is still in bed because she is teething and has seen midnight come and go for two nights in a row. She is cuddled up to her Daddy, also sleeping, who I’m pretty sure didn’t come to bed until about 4:00 this morning after studying all night long.

I’ve been sitting at the computer for most of the morning thinking about the end of Harry Potter vs. the end of LOST. Dumbledore said, in book seven, pretty much exactly how I feel about the end of my favorite stories, including LOST: Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

That series, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and now LOST. I mourn the end of fiction really hard, and after a conversation with Kelly last night, I lay in bed for hours thinking about how to introduce these things to Hazel and her future siblings.

It’s one of the most daunting responsibilities of parenthood. Don’t laugh.

I want her to enjoy Harry Potter (and eventually the other things) to their fullest. It was my only consolation when the I closed the last book – at least someday I’d be able to share it all with my children. How do I do that? Let her pick them up whenever she shows interest? Begin reading them to her aloud? Wait until all the siblings are old enough for a family reading? Will she be too old then? Read them all to each kid individually? What do I do what do I do?? It was no less magical because I started reading them in college versus childhood (when they didn’t exist), and had I read them as a kid I don’t know that I ever would have fully grasped the political and social implications in the stories, which are one of the greatest things about them, to me.

The only thing I know for sure is that Aunt Janet will read aloud the beginning and the end. Nothing is more magical than Janet reading Harry Potter. The voices, oh man, the voices!

Janet Potter, summer 2005.

The end of LOST is not going to be as emotional as the end of HP, but it’s going to feel so much more REAL because I have “seen” these characters with my own eyes constantly for four years, instead of just imagining them. They have voices and personalities that are common for all of us, and leave little room for what our brains can make up. I have dedicated so much time and brainpower to this show. I’m already really disappointed by this season, and when it ends it’s going to… well… it’s going to suck.

I remember when I first started watching it and we went out to dinner with Mario and Jenn, one of whom was hiding the season 1 set under their shirt when they arrived. I remember all of us wondering aloud where we’d be when the show ended. Would we all be watching it together? Would there be babies? Would Mikey and I still be in Canada, or off somewhere else? Would they be somewhere else?

And now we’re there. I’m pretty sure we’ll all be watching it together. We are home and they never left. There are two baby girls. How did we get here?

You’ve probably seen this at least once before, but I’m going to repost it because it just made me cry a lot A LOT. Written by Jenn, about the end of Potter:

For Half-Blood Prince, I pre-ordered from Amazon. It was delivered on the first day it was available. However, they had plenty of copies in stores at midnight. Mario ended up with one of those. This is a synopsis of what transpired that night:

So, Mario and my little brother John and I went to the Bellaire Kroger for the midnight release of the new Harry Potter book on July 16. They wanted to buy copies (mine was coming in the mail the next day from Amazon). I had seen advertisements for the Harry Potter release party at Kroger but I didn’t know what to expect.

We walked in to find a small crowd (maybe 25 people) of the mangiest literates I’ve ever seen. There were two women dressed up like witches working the booth. I was thoroughly convinced the larger of the two was a man in witches drag but John and Mario didn’t agree.

As we stood around waiting for the clock to strike twelve I stood back and observed the crowd. The two witches in drag kept trying to get everyone to join in on a group photo to send to JK Rowling and I wanted absolutely no part of that, so I kept hiding in the shampoo aisle which was an excellent vantage point to people-watch.

There was a woman in a bright tourquise knit skirt with leopard print flip-flops. She looked about 40ish and like she had spent most of those forty years sitting in the sun lathered in baby oil and smoking Winstons. She had on a very tight yellow Corona t-shirt which revealed what must of been a boob job in the 80’s that had gone seriously awry. It was chilly in the store so her pink buttons were standing at attention, only one of them was pointed up towards the flourescent lights and the other was pointed towards the National Enquirers on the bottom shelf of the rack she was leaning on.

Corona lady had her roughly 8 year old son with her who had a large plastic skull hanging around his neck and a black cape. There was a 50ish woman waiting in line with a tall pointy witch hat on. Mario kept talking to the that one. I swear he is like a puppy. If you take him anywhere you end up having conversations with random weirdos.

There was a man with a WWF t-shirt on and his daughter, a soccer-mom looking woman with a Dale Jarret shirt and a man who had to weigh nearly four hundred pounds waiting in line for his copy of the book holding a single jar of pickles.

The icing on this group cake was that my high school trig/stats teacher was also in line. She has a beard and always liked to feel the “material” of guy’s shirts in class. I hold her personally responsible for the only F I’ve ever received. Freshmen year WJU statistics.

The clock struck twelve and the group lurched forward snatching up their copies and scurrying to the registers. I did not need the Potter but I had noticed that the new Janet Evanovic was out in paperback so I picked that off the rack and headed to check. Mario somehow made it out uncscathed but when it came time to ring up my brother, the Kroger stock boy, who I’m sure had been called out of the warehouse to help rangle the mad Potter fans couldn’t figure out how to use the register.

He moved us from aisle 8 to aisle 9 and back and forth a few times, trying to get a register to work. The problem was that by doing this he kept creating lines behind us in both aisles. These people didn’t realize what was going on so they were getting really angry at John and I because they thought we kept cutting them in line. People kept yelling out comments about “cutters” and saying ”we were here first!”

I looked around at the crowd, wild with the excitement of a midnight release, itching to crack open their books and I imagined a riot. I envisioned a jar of pickles smashed on the floor, my little brother getting wacked with a leopard print flip-flop, me being thrown to the ground with a wrestling move by bulky He-witches. I realized that if the group noticed that I wasn’t there buying the Potter book that my fantasy brawl might happen. I threw money at my brother so that we could check out together and we bolted for the parking lot where Mario was nearly done with the first chapter.

And, at that point, I really knew how amazing it is that the little British welfare mom got so many people of different walks of life to read.

So, long-story even longer, I will probably pre-order a copy to be mailed to me (just to be safe) and still try to pick one up and the Bellaire Kroger. How could I pass up that excitement?