I'm starting to realize that it's going to be best to try and get up one smaller blog every day, than wait a couple of days and try and put it all together. I think I'll be able to muster up a small amount of time each day a little better. Because holy geez, you guys, has my last four days been crazy busy.
But here we are, in the Olympics. I've totally been looking forward to doing this again, since the last time we did the Winter Olympics (and honestly crossing my fingers that the boys will want to do it again!
It takes a long time to prepare for the games. I've been working on our plans, recipes, and projects for no less than a month now. Which was good on me, because we had a lot of things to do yesterday morning, but I did manage to get a few last minute things taken care of.
Everyday the boys can check out the Daily Board to let everyone know what the plans for the day are.
Our Olympic celebration started at dinner with a Brazilian meal, to honor the host country of this year's games. We had Feijoada (Brazilian Black Bean Stew), Brazilian Grilled Pineapple, Poa de Queijo (Brazilian Cheese Bread), salad with Brazilian salad dressing, and Brazilian Lemonade.
Results were mixed. But, it was all fun to try. And fun fact, the lemonade actually doesn't have any lemons in it- it's actually lime based!
At dinner, everyone picked random envelopes to see what country they would have to learn about and root for during the Olympics. There was a lot of talk about what country everyone wanted. There were even preemptive trades being discussed.
Peyton picked first and got South Korea, which was his first choice.
Calib picked Cuba, and Hayden picked Italy. But, they wanted to make a swap, so Calib is Italy and Hayden is Cuba.
Asa got his favorite, New Zealand (which makes up for when he ended up with France last time). And I got Spain- which I wanted because, well, churros.
After dinner we all made our flags. One side is our country flag (drawn the best we could), and the other side is a flag we each designed.
We put our flags up on the plant shelf, so you can see them from both sides.
After our flags were up, we had to light our Olympic cauldron.
But first, we had to have the torch relay.
Hayden got the honor of lighting our torch. The top of the torch actually became the light. We just took off the torch part, and squished the candle holder down.
It only turns on when it's dark, but it is battery operated, so it's low maintenance for me.
Each day we'll hold at least one Olympic event. Most of our events are a take on actual Olympic events, with the exception of a few. Our first event is one of those few: Opening Ceremonies Bingo.
Calib was making a bold prediction when he chose his Bingo card.
We sat down to watch the opening ceremonies with some Brazil inspired snacks.. sort of. So, I tried out that Walmart grocery pick up thing that's been circulating Facebook. If you order $50 worth of groceries, you get $10 off. I hate shopping at Walmart, but I figure we needed some stuff for the Olympics, and if I didn't have to find all these weird ingredients and navigate through the store, I'd give it a go. It was actually lovely. They had everything, brought it out to our car, gave us waters, I didn't even have to set foot in Walmart. But, if they don't have something you order, they pick out a substitute. It's worth noting, the substitute item is always of better quality, but you get charged the lower price. That's cool, except my only substituted item was nuts from Brazil. And my substitute was made in the USA. Oh well, I tried.
So we all hung out, watched the opening ceremonies, and played Bingo.
About a third of the way into the parade of countries we all had Bingo. But, Calib was the gold medal winner, followed by Hayden, Asa and me all tying for the silver. (We improvised on the medal stand).
Last Olympics we didn't do a medal ceremony each time, because I didn't want to have to make medals for every single event, even if they were just the candy medals like we had at the Waterstraut Olympics (plus that's a lot of candy), but this time I thought we could do medals if I could find something small to act as a medal. So, here it is. We have a gold medal bowl, a silver medal bowl, and a bronze medal bowl- and you get to pick one candy from the bowl of your medal. If you aren't a chocolate person, or not feeling it that day, you can pick sour patch kids instead (you get a couple that coordinate with your medal- yellow for gold, blue for silver, or orange for bronze.) The sour patch kids are also nice, because if you participate with a good attitude, you get one of your choosing as a participation medal.
The losers also have to dish out the medals.
Then, the medals get recorded for the final tallies in which the winners get actual medals (I still have to make those!), instead of candy. You get three points for every gold, two for every silver, and one for every bronze. Asa and I won't participate in every event. So it should be the three boys on the podium in the end.
At the end of the day, you can see where everyone stands on the daily board.
In non Olympic news we made it to Hayden's end of the summer reading program event at the library.
Asa and Peyton came along to hunt Pokemon.
And at the end of it all, Hayden got his prizes for completing six books.
Asa meanwhile, was totally embarrassed about carrying my books I had on hold: one by Hillary Clinton, and one by Donald Trump. It takes a lot to embarrass Asa, but apparently, this did.
Oh. And the boys all got bike mounts to make Pokemon hunting safer on their bikes.
Also worth noting, is all the fun random fruit I have in my fruit stand this week. Yay Olympics and trying new stuff.
We've completed most of our stuff today, so I'll be back tonight or early tomorrow with that. Also, I'm hoping to get the Candy Bar Election stuff up tonight so we can open voting.
So Busy!
Next Up: Olympics Day 2
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