So, this is what happens when you combine a post you saw over at Capital Parent on great Olympic themed Pinterest crafts with a personal love of flags, and kids with newfound flag knowledge from Stack The Countries:

I LOVE these little flags. They are made from coloured paper (about 1/4 of a sheet each), with pieces cut up and glued on, and some of the white stars made with a liquid paper pen. The Pinterest idea is to put them on a festive garland to celebrate the Olympics, but I believe the Captain has done them one better – he plans to open a small betting pool, and to use the flags on some sort of giant leader board to track the current medal counts of the various countries, while setting the odds and (possibly) breaking kneecaps. I am so proud.

This kind of detail work is something I adore, and I love flags too, so I could literally do this all day long. Yesterday I was teaching a class, and the girls and I were making flags, and then suddenly I looked up and realized I needed to leave for my class in 20 minutes and had not actually prepared any dinner for anyone. And HELL if I was going to let them eat the flags.

(We had pancakes out of the freezer and some apple slices. But we also had awesome flags, so I call that a win.)

Some of the flags have very complicated shields and symbols on them, and I’m not going to lie, we cheated and printed them out on the computer, like the middle bits of this India flag and Mexico flag. Did you know Mexico has some sort of bird eating a snake on its flag? Don’t mess with Mexico, is what I’m thinking.

So I was encouraging the kids to pick out flags they wanted to make, pointing them at the list of Olympic winter countries (no way am I making every flag in the world…at least not this week), and while I was hoping for nice simple things like Germany and Russia and Finland, the Little Miss insists there’s only one flag, and one flag only, she wants, and that is Macedonia. So we made a flag for Macedonia, and I’m rather proud of myself:

Since they are sending like, three athletes to the Olympics, I’m guessing the Captain will not have much use for the flag of Macedonia on his leader board, but it’s pretty. And in the world of flags, that’s a gold medal right there.