The Winter Olympics come to Niceville Florida

 We have a new tradition to our nighttime routine.  7 PM finds all of us in the living room tuning in to the the days' recap of Olympic events.  Dominic is pretty captivated and watches until the day's medal count chart is shown.  I keep waiting for him to fall asleep, but he has stayed awake every night which is more than I can say for his mom.  The above is Dom doing his impression of downhill skiing.

 The above is Dom doing his impression of winning a gold in downhill skiing.  By the way, Grandpa and Grandma, Dom is very interested in skiing next time we go!

 But, what got all three kids' excited was when bobsledding started this past weekend.  We were able to watch the first heats live.  Dom immediately started looking around for how to recreate the event.  I suggested the chairs.  He did comment that there was no such thing as a 3-man bobsled, and I said he needed to let that slide for the sake of domestic peace.

 They were not thrilled with the first iteration of the bobsled and quickly moved on to bigger and better designs.

 As you can see here:

 I do not actually have a picture of the final sled much to the disappointment of my eldest.  But, his mechanical brother really did a nice job even if he was hindered by a lack of blocks.  I explained to him if he made the sides too high, they would not be able to jump in.  He seemed to accept this without too many reservations. 

 Just about every night, I have set up the living room floor as a type of bed, not unlike when we were in San Antonio.  With the lights dimmed and their snuggly blankets tucked in around them, Will and Molly are generally fast asleep by 8:30 at the latest.  They look so sweet.  Unfortunately, my 8 month pregnant body cannot quite lift my kids as easily as I would like.  One particular night I had warned Will that if he wanted to sleep in his bed, he needed to move himself.  He was too tired to understand this and fell asleep as usual on the floor.  He let me know about a quarter to 6 the next morning that he was not pleased with my decision to cover him with a few blankets and leave him slumbering on the floor.  We have not had the issue since.  As a team, he's made it to bed every night.

 As excited as Dom is about the various sporting events (and we have a winter sport video game that they all enjoy playing), he is more excited about the countries.  Particularly, Jamaica's bobsled team thanks to the movie "Cool Runnings".  A couple of days' ago he started asking me to print off national flags for him to color and he lines them all up during the evening's broadcast and will hold up various ones as a national competes.  I know he ultimately would love to color all 80+ countries' flags, but I'm not sure we have enough ink to accomplish this.  Will also really likes to color the flags so that would be double the ink (and, no, only printing off one each and splitting them is not an option) I hope they have the same enthusiasm for the 2016 Summer Olympics and maybe we can start a few weeks ahead of time.  So far we have colored the United States, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Canada, Jamaica (natch), and Cameroon.  I doubt there are athletes from Cameroon competing in the Olympics, but KU's star freshman, Joel Embiid, hails from there, so we printed it off as well.  Never too early to prepare for March Madness!