An Olympic tribute

Since the opening ceremony on 08/08/08 (which, by the way was VERY cool if you ask me!) our family has watched a considerable amount of the summer olympic games. Allison has shown a good amount of interest and has watched along with us. After spending some time watching diving, she announced,

"When I grow up, after I'm done being a castle builder and a princess, I want to be a diver!"

We suggested that she may want to first learn to put her head under the water and also to swim...but those are just a couple of technical details. We were pretty impressed with Chen Ruolin's dives the other night.

Supposedly, she has been diving since she was 4 years old! I told Allison about this but it didn't seem to motivate her to start anytime soon. When I was looking at Chen's profile online, I was a little surprised to read this:

"If Chen does win gold in Beijing, she plans to reward herself with a big dinner. Since she has started growing, she has had to quit eating dinner in order to keep her weight down to be able to perform at her best, at times drinking water in order to stave off hunger. But once the Games are over, Chen plans to indulge at the table with her friends and family."

I'm no expert, but I can't imagine starving yourself is the best idea for a teenage athlete...but heck, what do I know...she did win two gold medals!

Today when we turned on the TV, they were showing rhythmic gymnastics. This is one of those sports that I forget about until I see it on the olympics every 4 years. When we turned it on, I couldn't remember what it was officially called so we named it "ribbon dancing." Allison and Lauren were quite intrigued with the ribbon dancers. Especially the pink sparkly ones.

We spent the rest of the afternoon turning the girls into ribbon dancers and practicing their routines.

Both contestents received first place (it was a tie--too close to call). And celebrated their victory with a gold medal dinner of macaroni and cheese with hotdogs and potato chips--a dinner of champions (Dad was gone on a youth temple trip today, do you think I am going to fix something fancy??).

Here the girls sport their shiny new medals.

Allison took this picture of Megan wearing her medal. Megan was too busy watching the olympics to look at the camera.

All in all, we have enjoyed watching the summer games this year and will be sad when the TV goes back to its normal boring self again.