Backyard Olympics

My kids have been obsessed with the London 2012 Olympic games.  So we decided to have our own Olympics in the backyard.  Each of my kids invited 3-4 friends and we had a party!

We started it off by splitting them up into 4 countries and then rotating them through different events: balance beam, shot put, standing long jump and discus.  We also did some pretty sweet Olympic rings visors.  Then we all joined up for relay races.  The relay races were definitely the biggest hit and we did about a million variations!

 

For the final event, Nate and I raced.  All was going well until Nate decided winning was way more important than character and pushed me into a tree.  Lame.  Some kids tried to DQ me for a false start.  We are definitely going to need a rematch. 

After the events, we ate lots of yummy treats.  Cupcakes, gold medal sugar cookies to decorate, watermelon stars, patriotic strawberries, gold candy, and popcorn torches.

  

The lovely dessert table looked like this in about 2 seconds.  A new Olympic record.

  

 

After all the food was consumed, we ended with the medal ceremony and a few photo ops with the torch.

Although a little chaotic at times, we had such a fun night!  The only major flop was this:  Lola and I worked for a ridiculously long period of time making these seemingly simple torches we found on pinterest.  We tried all sorts of things to try to get them to stand up.  We finally thought we had it and I walked them to the backyard just as a big gust of wind knocked every single one of them down.  Nate and I were laughing so hard.  They went in the garbage and a big bowl of popcorn was pulled out instead.