Dear Kid,

We’re headed toward the Olympics and Rio isn’t Ready.

Haven’t we been here before? Russia wasn’t ready and yet somehow pulled it off.

But Rio has some issues Russia never even thought of.

Like the Zika virus.

So far several athletes (and by “several athletes” I mean several athletes that you’ve heard of) have decided not to attend the Olympics.

Interestingly, they are all male and none of them are pregnant. (Rory McIlryoy, Tejay van Garderern, and Greg Rutherford are the athletes in question. OK, maybe you haven’t heard of them. You’re not likely to hear about them any time soon because they won’t be winning in Rio since they won’t be there.)

Brazilian officials are responding by saying the athletes in question are just big babies and teaching mosquitoes a synchronized dance for the opening ceremonies.

The other big scandal (in case you haven’t been keeping up with these things) is that the Rio de Janeiro anti-doping lab has been suspended for “wrongly interpreting” test results. Meaning they “oopsed” a few times too many and “produced false positives.”

This of course led to a whole lot of he said/they said and tastes-great-less-filling controversies which are never good for smooth Olympics. It is unclear if the lab will be, um, fixed in time for the games which are—wait for it—only 6 weeks away.

Bottom line? Who the heck knows, but it will be interesting.

Love, Mom