Tales from the Gorge: 34/52

21 August 2016

34/52 - Olympic Baby

One of the benefits of Oskar arriving when he did is that we had an excuse to just sit and watch the Olympics! Starting about 5 years ago, we became "cord cutters" when we dropped all TV service in favor of Netflix on a Roku. So it took a little investigation to figure out how we could even watch the Olympics online. We subscribed to a streaming service (SlingTV) for the sole purpose of watching the Olympics, but none of the online-only options include the main NBC network. So we could only watch the "off brand" events that didn't make the cut for primetime NBC viewing: team handball, water polo, badminton, table tennis, soccer, etc. Nevertheless, it was pretty engaging and impressive to watch athletes at the top of their sport.

Anders was enraptured by the Olympics in general, regardless of the sport. For each event he watched, he had to choose which "side" he would root for, then he would act as if he had been rooting for that person/team all of his life. One day he looked at the event schedule and saw kayaking and canoeing for 5am the following day. He immediately decided that he would get up to watch it! And to our great surprise, he actually did. (This is the kid who has slept until 11am on Christmas morning and who struggles to get up by 7am to catch the school bus.) On that day, he watched the Olympics for 13 hours straight. Hey - it's the Olympics!

Anders and Grandma Donna made cheese crackers, since everyone knows that watching sports on TV is better with salty snacks.

I think this was the first time that Anders was exposed to television commercials. Since most of what he has watched previously was educational programming of some sort, he interpreted them all as public service announcements. "We should get a Pizza Hut Big Flavor Dipper pizza. It comes with 4 sauces!" "Did you know that ExxonMobil makes cars go further with less?"

We had another full week of doctor appointments, including the 2 week checkups for both Oskar and Corinne. Both passed with flying colors. Oskar made it back up to his birth weight at just about the two week mark.

Oskar and his "life-size" sock monkey, courtesy of Aunt 'Nita

While in Portland, we couldn't pass up another stop at Salt & Straw. I guess it's not every day that a newborn waits in the S&S line, so Oskar garnered quite a bit of attention. One boy asked if he was real. (We sometimes wondered that ourselves.)

After a week of Anders being able to spend time with Oskar, he is more excited about his little brother than he was before he was born.

Anytime he is around, he tries to give his brother kisses and tells him how cute he is. If we had any doubts about how Anders would handle no longer being the only child, they have now been thoroughly dispelled.

Since Oskar was born early, we had a bonus 0th birthday party for him on his official due date! Anders insisted. And since Anders also had a 0th birthday party, it seemed only fair. Plus, cake.