"I am certainly not begrudging you your maternity leave--not at all, but I much prefer the way the States does leave. Maternity leave is only 12 weeks there, and that's shorter than here, but--they also have paternity leave that is the same length as the length of the mother's leave. They firmly believe dads are just as important as the moms. The way it goes here, dads are largely cut out of being part of their children's lives right from the bloody start. I'm sorry, but it just isn't right or fair either one. One or two weeks. What sort of crap is that, really, except old stereotypical thinking that a man's place is just to be the breadwinner while the mom should handle the raising of the kids. Apparently, we're supposed to just get out of the way and let you lot just handle it all by yourselves," he sighed. "I'm sure you and I will manage it just fine, though."
"Oh," he said, when she mentioned the secrets at Hogwarts. "Yeah. The one eyed witch passage. I found out where that was purely because of who I hung out with. I hung out with Khaat and Brian because we were all Gryffindors. And--remember who Khaat's godfather is--Michael Tremaine, and Michael learned it from Robert and Remus and Sirius. So, of course, he told Khaat and Brian where it was, and we definitely used it more often than McGonagall knew.
"It's up on the third floor in the castle, in the hallway that leads to Gryffindor tower. There is a statue of a one eyed witch that is a humpback. It takes a spell to open the passage, but its the hump on the witch's back that is the opening to the passage. That leads to a slide that is a heck of a great slide that takes you from the third floor all the way down to a tunnel below the basement level. And then, it takes about a hour to walk the distance of the tunnel, where you come up into the basement of Honeydukes. That passage wasn't a well known thing back in our school days either, but Michael had mad skills at getting into and out of places even way back when he was a student.
"In fact, I remember the first time I met Michael," he laughed. "We had slipped out of the school one evening when we were supposed to be studying, and we took the tunnel to Honeydukes. We came up through the tunnel to the Honeydukes cellar and went upstairs, and the first thing I saw was this guy who was standing at the fudge counter. I walked up to the fudge counter beside him, and the only thing I saw was that several big thick slices of chocolate fudge seemed to just vanish before my eyes. I was standing right beside him, and I didn't see how the heck he did it. Then Khaat introduced him, and I just made a guess that he'd swiped that darned fudge. Now, I've learned he does, in fact, swipe the fudge. Marcus's dad owns Honeydukes now, and he knows exactly what Michael does, and he just bills him for it.
"I have no idea if the boys know about that passage out of the school yet, but if there are any Weasleys at Hogwarts now, they're surely in Gryffindor, and there's every chance that Sam and Victor might know about it. I look at it like this--if they'd used it and gotten caught, they'd have gotten in trouble, and we'd have been notified of it. So either they don't know about it, or they've been clever enough to not get caught. I'm fine with them knowing about it as long as they're not acting like little idiots with it."