The Olympics in London

I LOVE watching the Olympics!  We got to watch some of the Opening Ceremony in Atlanta before we left for Tokyo.  It was neat as always watching the parade of countries-whether few or many athletes you can tell how excited they all are to be there!

As an American, there is just something sad about not being able to hear Bob Costas do the Olympic commentary!  We watched a little from our hotel in Tokyo but of course, that commentary wasn't very useful to us-since it was in Japanese!  Usually though we were so tired from our days outings and jet lagged that we were doing well to keep all 3 kids awake long enough to eat dinner and get into pjs before they were falling asleep and we didn't usually last long afterward.

We were able to get some special channels through our cable company in Manila to see the Olympics though I was a little frustrated that what was actually shown didn't follow the published schedule.  We were able to see a wide variety of sports-kids all enjoyed watching track and field and greatly admiring how fast Usain Bolt could run.  We saw individual gymnastics competitions-my favorite-along with the high diving which the men's final competition was so exciting and intense to watch!  Scott and Ryan were very excited about seeing taekwondo, which they had taken lessons in over the summer.  We also watched varying amounts of sailing, equestrian, javelin, swimming, diving, lots of running, pole vaulting, high jump, water polo, soccer, beach and not beach volleyball, table tennis, rhythmic gymnastics, synchronized swimming, hurdles, and more.  It was great fun.

Since when we first arrived back in Manila, it was raining and the kids were out of school, we got to watch extra Olympics and did some games of our own-The Elliott Fun Olympics.  We had shotput-with a ball of tinfoil wadded up, several running, hopping, skipping, and other energy burning "races", javelin with a choice of drinking straw javelins or paper towel roll javelins with a bucket as the target to hit, and ring toss-diving rings with a target of a 1.5 (not 2 b/c they don't sell those here) liter drink bottle.

 Ashley decided to read when she got tired of tossing her rings

Her shotput

 Scott and Ryan doing shotput-Ryan won gold in this event for the children!

 Greg throwing a straw javelin-we had 2 types:drinking straws taped together and paper towel rolls

 Scott and Ashley on the javelin

 The final event was the relay

Any excuse to get them to run is a good one and we had fun-swimming events took place another day:  we did a sprint across the pool-giving Ashley a head start, craziest jumps, best cannonball, Scott and Ryan raced the length of the pool and Scott only won by a nose.  Hope you enjoyed the Olympics too!