The BEGINNING and the END....of the Olympic Games!

The Beginning of Olympic Fun!

In keeping with family tradition (I've even blogged about it before here ) we were very excited for the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games. 

It was strange though, having Shenna and Aaron away for our official opening ceremonies party. 

So, I invited Mom and Lynae to join us. 

Actually, we ended up having the party up at Lynae's.  It just made it easier for mom.

Since the Olympics were in London this year, I spent the day cooking up a bunch of English Cuisine.

We had scones,

crumpets,

English lemon tea cookies

 and of course the main dish....

.....fish and chips.

We all wore red, white or blue and Sam's shirt even had the Union Jack on it!

 Kiera made our traditional cake.  This year we did the olympic rings. 

 I thought she did a fantastic job of decorating.

And of course, I love the Olympics simply for the geography lesson.  This year we had a pretty large map that I found at Walmart.  The kids enjoyed finding the countries and putting a gold star on the map as the athletes marched into the stadium.  However, every time there was a commercial break, we would have to play catch-up. 

And still, some of those countries were pretty hard to find!

The End of the Games!
Since Aaron and Shenna both missed my amazing fish and chips,

we had them again for the closing ceremonies!

They both agreed that they were delicious

Kiera also made the amazing cookies above. The photo doesn't do them justice.

Tasty and beautiful and gone in a flash.

This year, the fantasy olympics with athletes and medals just didn't happen.
(read about the results of our fantasy games 2010 here) 

Maybe it was because two of us were gone for a little bit of the games,

or maybe I was just too busy to sit down and organize it all.

The best we could do was pick countries for the medal count.

This still isn't very fair because it is easy to predict the countries who will get the most.

So, to make it a little more even, we just had to pick them randomly, AND

the United States wasn't even put in the hat.

At the End of the Games....these are the results for the WHITAKER MEDAL COUNT.

Kiera-Germany = 44

Samuel-Brazil = 17

Shenna-Norway = 4

Enoch-Kazakhstan = 13

Aaron-China = 87

and me behind the camera with Argentina = 4

The BIG winner and the little losers!

Great Job London and Great Britian!  We enjoyed the olympic games!

however, NBC, next time, less commercials and more variety please!!!