I blame NBC…

We have dark circles under our eyes…  We yawn during the day… We have to hit the snooze button three times before dragging ourselves out of bed.  Well of course, you say.  You’re parents of an 11-month old!

Au contraire.  We are addicted to the Olympics.  Now before I get into this topic of the Olympics, I must note that it’s unclear exactly when, but several weeks ago some kind of baby switch flipped and now Jakey loves to sleep all night.  We just lay him down in his crib and then zonk… we don’t hear from him until 5am, sometimes as late as 7:30 on weekends.  I’ve decided that maybe there just comes a time when babies are ready to sleep and that training and book advice and all that doesn’t have a whole lot to do with it.  At this point I don’t know and I don’t care.  This is heaven.

OK so back to the Olympics.  I am a self-professed Olympoholic.  I don’t know why I never noticed this before, but James seems to be even worse than me.  The other night I told him it was time for us to go to bed and he said, “For good?”  No, let’s go to bed for a little while and then once we’re refreshed, get back up to watch women’s moguls… ?!

Anyway, the last few Olympic games I figured we had to stay up watching the actual gold medal rounds at 11:30pm because there was some kind of international broadcasting time difference that had to be tolerated.  It was painful, but it was a fact of physics or the international time-space continuum or something.

According to timeanddate.com, it is THE EXACT SAME TIME in Vancouver, British Columbia as it is in San Jose, California.  I repeat… THE EXACT SAME TIME.  And therefore I am really racking my brain as to why I’m going to have to stay up until 10:30pm tonight I’m sure, to see if Apolo Anton Ohno is going to win another gold medal.  How can this be?

I blame NBC.  When I was a little girl, back in my most formative years… when I developed this addiction to the Olmpics… I remember heartwarming family dinners at the game table in the living room.  It was the only time, every 4 years, that we were allowed to eat dinner in front of the TV.  We were the picture of perfect American family bliss– enjoying our steak and baked potatoes while being wowed by Mary Lou Retton, Nadia Comaneci, Peekaboo Street, Carl Lewis, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Tanya Harding.

How are the kids of today going to develop into Olympoholics if they’re all in bed during the best footage?!  If we start to have fewer U.S. Olympians without the competitive spirit and drive needed to bring home gold, don’t forget, it’s NBC’s fault.  We’ve all been warned about the inevitable fall of the American superpower… who knew that TV broadcasters would be to blame?

Yes, you read it here first.  I’ll probably be citing this blog post knowingly when I’m 90 and the U.S. medal count is equivalent to the historic achievements of Bahrain.