Harry Potter changed our family 23 years ago

Elissa at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando.

Today is Harry Potter's 44th birthday.

Or at least it would be, if he were real.

In the Potter books, the boy wizard was born on the 31st of July 1980. As one website has it, the fact that July 31st is also author J.K. Rowling's birthday "does not seem like a coincidence."

I knew nothing of the Potter-verse when the first book in the series – "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," or the "Philosopher's Stone," as it was titled in the UK – was released in the U.S. in September 1998. We had just had our third child a month earlier, and well, my life centered much more on diapers and late-night feedings than it did on children's literature.

It was a few years later, when Elissa was in second grade, that Mr. Potter entered our lives. Elissa's teacher, Mrs. Kastelic, was going to read the first book to the class and Terry had some questions about it. She didn't know much about Harry Potter, so she decided to read the book herself.

And thus it began.

Terry was blown away by it. Our voracious young reader Elissa was, too.

And in time, so was I. I read all the books and listened to the audio versions a few times, enjoying the immense talents of the great narrator Jim Dale.

By the time the series was four or five books old, you could count on some portion of our family lining up at Barnes & Noble at midnight to get one of the first copies of any new Potter release. Once, my mother-in-law Judy even took the girls for one of these late-night Potter parties.

We watched the movies, of course, and to this day we still sometimes play a Harry Potter trivia board game when we're all together.

The depth of the narrative, the intricacies of the Potter universe, the growing pains of the young characters...it was all perfectly timed for our kids.

Whenever we visit The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Florida's Universal Studios, you better believe Elissa is there in full Hogwarts robes. She is as dedicated to her Potter fandom at 30 as she was at age 8.

So happy birthday, Harry. And thanks for being such an important part of our family for all these years.

Those mundane home movies of yours are immensely valuable

Like most families, we have gigs and gigs of digital videos of our kids as they were growing up.

While home movie cameras have been around for more than half a century, the digital era has made it exponentially easier to chronicle your family history and share it with everyone (whether they're interested or not).

Lately, having watched some of our videos from the chaotic mid- and late 90s, I've come to realize the importance of these personal archives.

I had forgotten, for instance, just how crazy those days were for us. Logic suggests having four (and later five) little kids in the same house is inevitably going to generate some degree of mayhem, but it had slipped my mind just how fun and crazy it all was.

The short clip above is a scene from our family Christmas 1998, and a quieter account a week later of little Jared eating baby cereal for the first time.

Nothing earth-shattering, yet there is so much to enjoy in those two minutes:

• The tumult of voices that punctuated every family Christmas
• A shot of my mother-in-law and father-in-law, now both gone, as their granddaughters Courtney and Elissa present Grandpa with a gift (a weather rock, as it turns out)
• Hairstyles I had forgotten about, and a long-since-faded hair color (dark brown) for me
• Jared's little Cleveland Lumberjacks hockey bib
• Jared's less-than-enthusiastic reaction to his first taste of something that wasn't breast milk (I believe the cereal was mixed with breast milk, but after a few spoonfuls, it didn't seem to help)
• Scenes from our old house on East 300th Street

As I said, none of this is life-changing or especially significant to anyone but us. Yet I can't get over how wonderful it all is.

As time goes on and your children inevitably grow up and move on, you forget the small moments that made up the fabric of life. The big events are great, of course, but your existence is mostly the everyday stuff, the memory of which brings back feelings you forgot you ever had.

Thank God for digital video.