An Oops of Olympic Proportions (but we stuck the landing!)

Oh, the shame! The 2010 Winter Olympics have come and gone, and not once did I mention them or how in love I am with Vancouver. What a beautiful place! I’ve only seen it from the deck of a ship journeying from Alaska. I definitely want Vancouver to be the destination next time. Now I have only memories …

We had an Olympics oops in our house … opening night, no less. (image source: 2010 Winter Olympics on Wikipedia). It’s one of those “funny thing happened on the way to the Coliseum” type stories, so bear with me a sec.

For weeks before the event, every time we saw a commercial about the Olympics, Catherine would twirl about pretending to be an ice skater. Having told her about all the pageantry, she wanted to see that, too. That first night, she was over the moon about being able to stay up late to watch the Opening Ceremonies. Here we are thinking she’ll get to see all the beautiful stuff and learn about Canada.

And what do the organizers do? They move the parade of athletes to the TOP of the program so the athletes could see it. Shift gears. The colorful uniforms were good for a little bit, but then Catherine wanted know when Team USA would come in, since “U” is near the end of the alphabet and the skaters would be right after that. Having listened to the stadium announcer introduce each country first in French, then in English, we assumed (ahem concluded) that everyone was entering the stadium using the French alphabet. SO-O-O thinking that we would be the États-Unis d’Amérique, we told Catherine she could stay up until the American team entered the stadium. Silly parents …

We were W-R-O-N-G, but there was no backing off that promise. Team USA didn’t enter the stadium until about 10:30, and as soon as we got the commercial break. The TV went off.  By then Catherine was too tired to argue to see the show, and off to bed she went. The next day, though, our 21st Century girl asked if we could pull up the videos of what she missed.  So we found the Opening Ceremonies Encore on MSNBC. [Note: Link takes you to the Encore on the MSNBC website. NBC/MSN make you downoad “Silverlight” to watch the videos.]

About five minutes after settling in at the computer, Catherine came running out of the office asking for paper and a pencil.  She wanted to create a list so she could remember “all the weird things I see.”  Writing because she wants to? All right! She was busy writing for an hour!

Snow indoors … totomes (totems) …  whales coming out of the floor … waves really making a circle and turn to samen (salmon) .. and turn to totemes … guy with tatoot belly … leaf exploshon (explosion) …

and so on.  She filled both sides of a page and was so excited to read to us everything she saw. A gold medal performance. There are lots of lessons in this story, but my favorite is that you just never know where inspiration will come from. Even a video can be a writing prompt …

Was Catherine the inspiration for this month’s Prompt Idea post at Booklights? Well, head on over and tell me what you think …

Image source:

Opening Ceremony, Vancouver Sun

Team USA and Vancouver 2010 logos – Wikipedia