It's no secret that the Olympic games are up, up and away - hooray! Already you can feel the friendly rivalry in the air, even though only one sporting event has taken place so far. As luck would have it, due to time difference between London and Australia, the girls were able to watch a very small part of the opening ceremony live. Between breakfast and swimming they were able to see the countries I through S enter the stadium. It was actually a really special thing to read the names of the countries out to them and listen to their running commentary about flags and uniforms, who looked happy or serious, which countries must be small or big based on the number of people representing each country and so on. Yesterday to celebrate the start of the Olympics I researched some of the long lost events... one of the events I didn't write about from those wacky games in Paris, 1900, was hot air ballooning. Another sport that didn't take off, so to speak, from those games, the French apparently won all the hot-air-ballooning events that year for height, distance and duration. To honor the idea of trial rather than triumph, the girls and I did our best to replicate a hot air balloon in the back yard.
First we blew up 8 balloons of different colours, then tied them together (I'll include the full tutorial in the next newsletter), then we attached the "balloon-ball" to the tree-rope in the yard. The girls then took turns 'flying' on their hot air balloon.
After the novelty of that had worn off, we took the balloon-ball off the rope and simply played toss-and-catch. The great thing about a balloon-ball is that it takes only minutes to make. The down-side is that it takes only minutes to break. One by one, the balloons popped, and the ball disassembled itself. Never mind, we also managed to play the world's shortest soccer match and make balloon-hats out of the remnants.
I love playing backyard games with the kids, parties or no parties, and balloon-balls are one of the fastest ways to initiate a load of them!
