It's Mii!

I told you in my last entry that our kids were given the opportunity to earn a Wii Olympics game by completing a memorization challenge and doing some oral presentations for the family.

Well, they finished everything and got the game yesterday. We decided to make the game a bit more educational by insisting that they only play with "Olympic Miis." So far we have Michael Phelps, Mark Spitz, Wilma Rudolph, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Mary Lou Retton, but they have plans to create many more!

Here's a video of the challenges. One reason I'm glad we have our new video camera is that I have missed getting their voices recorded a lot in the last several years. Noah's little voice is still so cute! If you stick with it until the end, you'll see a frantic 100 m Wii race.

Olympic Challenge @ Yahoo! Video

Two of fun things we've enjoyed learning about this week are the national anthems and the olympic mascots.

We played "Name That Tune" using itunes clips of different national anthems. We are now pretty good at identifying the anthems of the USA, UK, Canada, Germany, China and Russia. After that, it gets pretty difficult. It would be neater if each country's music reflected the kind of music you associate with that country, but instead I think all the anthems were written around the same time period with pretty much the same style.

We also learned a lot about the past and present Olympic mascots. These are the ones from the Beijing Olympics:



I thought they were pretty cheesy, but when I read about what each one represents and why they were designed the way they were, it seems like a lot of thought went into it. You can read about them here.

Anyway, if you still think they're cheesy, you need to check out the mascot from the 1972 Munich Olympics - a pastel-striped weiner dog!