Harry Potter Blues

I love to read, and I love getting lost in a good book. I love feeling that connection with the characters and story line. What I hate is when a good book ends. That feeling of not wanting it to be over, of saying good-bye to the world you were just immersed in so completely. For me, it is a really sad, bummed out, blue feeling. Do you know what I mean? Last week, I finished reading the Harry Potter series with Charlie and Carson. It took us about 2 years to read all 7 books. (I had read them all on my own before, so I was re-reading them.) We didn't read faithfully every day (especially during the school year), and sometimes there were weeks and weeks that we didn't read at all. But this summer we read both The Half-Blood Prince, and The Deathly Hallows in just a couple of months. (Book #5 Order of the Phoenix was the longest, and our least favorite, so that one took forever to get through.) The past few weeks, we have read Harry Potter every day, and really looked forward to it. Our goal was to finish Half-Blood Prince by the movie's release date, and we achieved our goal! The three of us celebrated by going to see the movie in the theater on it's debut date. We all loved it! It was awesome to see the movie right after finishing the book, so it's all fresh in your mind. Then we started reading book #7 (the final book) and we could not put it down! It was so frustrating to have to stop reading to go to bed or do our chores. We plowed through it really fast, and loved every minute of it. My friend, April, called me on the day we were reading the last 100 pages, and I had totally been crying as I was reading (It is a very emotional book! SPOILER ALERT: especially when Fred, Tonks, and Lupin die, and when Harry finds out that he will have to die in order to destroy Voldemort.) April was like, are you getting a cold? and I answered, no--we're just reading Harry Potter and I'm crying my eyes out! Now that we finished the book, it is such a let down. The boys keep saying, "Let's read Harry Potter--oh yeah, we're done." It is such a great series, and it was fun to read it again and see it all fresh through the eyes of my kids. I'm still having dreams about a face-off with Voldemort! I really, really love a good book. I just HATE when it ends. :)