London 2012

I get excited for the Olympics anyway, but this year I was super excited that this would be the first Olympics that the kids were old enough to enjoy/be aware of. In anticipation of the start of the big event, the kids and I spent an afternoon drawing the flags of about 15 different countries on note cards and swagged them on the mantle and whipped up some quick "torches" with construction paper and tissue paper.

 I also thought it would be a great idea to make a country flag bingo game for us to play while watching the Parade of Nations. The idea was that we each got to mark off a country's flag on our card when we saw that country parade into Olympic stadium. And if you marked off all of them in a row, you could eat an M&M that matched one of the colors on that flag (in case you were wondering, this is the part that most interested the kids). But apparently I have a terrible two-year memory and/or missed the memo that the Parade of Nations isn't until AFTER the rest of the Opening Ceremonies and that it goes on forever! And of course, the kids and I had made the cards earlier in the day and had chosen flags based on attractiveness and not where they fall in alphabetical order. If I had been smart, I would have pretended like the Parade of Nations didn't happen until the next morning, surreptitiously recorded it and made it a morning game. But I had already talked up a late night with bingo and M&Ms, so we proceeded as planned with only a slight deviation: about halfway through, Luke and I started calling out "random" countries (that just happened to correspond with flags on certain people's bingo cards) and moved things along a little more quickly.

Maybe now that I've written all of this down I will remember this key fact in another two years. I'll get back to you in February 2014.