Olympics Party

I was really excited for the Olympics. We bought a super basic cable package just so we could watch the Olympics. We've since learned that there are some ways to get select channels without paying for cable, but oh well. It will mean I can watch Once Upon A Time the week of instead of waiting a whole week this season. ;-)

Back to the Olympics. I have some really good memories of passed Olympics. I remember one time playing (in a hotel room..?) with my sisters and Rachel would think of Olympic events and we'd all compete and I think we even made medals to award ourselves. Things like who could jump from the bed across sofa cushions the fastest. I'm pretty sure every event was Rachel-gold, Rebekah-silver, Sarah-bronze. It's cool, I'm over it. ;-) David was probably smart enough to just go read a book about a cool Olympian instead.

I also remember staying up late to watch the ice skating. It was one of Mom's favorites so it got a pretty good turn out from the Terry family. I remember seeing some Olympic ice skaters perform in a show we went to at some point and thinking it was AWESOME.

I remember watching Sean White in his first Olympic games when he premiered as "The Flying Tomato" and I remember watching his last games in Sochi when he didn't finish quite the way he wanted and my heart went out to him. I was also a Michelle Kwan fan in her day and I remember my mom talking about how amazing she was as she skated.

I also really enjoyed watching Michael Phelps crush it at the games in London when Jayce and I were dating. That was the summer that we met!

For those reasons and because reading The Boys in the Boat got me excited for the upcoming Olympics months in advance, I was geared up for the Rio games to commence this summer!

I want my kids to share my enjoyment of the Olympics, so I was excited to expose them to it with these games. I also see it as a great opportunity to make them more aware of the great wide world they're apart of. So, we kicked off the Olympics with a party the day of the opening ceremonies.

They made their own torches and ran around the house with them with my mom in the lead, we read a book about the Olympics, we talked a little about the country of Brazil, and we of course competed in several different events. I got the biggest kick out of watching the kids! I'm so glad we did it, we'll for sure do this for other Olympics. The kids were so funny and so cute.

The set up for our "gymnastics" poses.

Torch making.

A running relay. Sorry for my cheering, I just couldn't help myself with these kids.

Balance beam activity. I was really big on encouraging them to perform a proper dismount because well, it was adorable.

   

  

Seeing who could jump the farthest. Ben killed it.

  

 A water relay trying to see which team could fill up their cups the fastest.

  

Brazilian food! We had Brazilian cheese bread and brigadeiros.

We decided they were rainbow, Cougar blue, chocolate, and American.

For the medal ceremony we played a YouTube clip of Michael Phelps getting a gold medal and had them stand and hold their hands over their hearts as we gave them their medals. To die for. I wish I had a recording.

The cute participants.