How To Make Bowling Harder and More Complicated Than You Thought Imaginable
No bowling lanes needed - just add a kid and very flexible rules.
Today after school the child came home and wanted - of course - to watch her tablet and all her shows.
She still had her backpack on her back when she came in the door so we suggested, you know - she talks to us first and let us know how her day was. Of course, she refused but then she saw on the kitchen table a new sticker book that BW picked up today for super cheap.
The tablet got forgotten about and she went into what I call “the zone”. When she’s in the zone you do not want to distract her from the zone because this means she’s happily playing by herself with a cardboard box, or like today - stickers.
We got a good hour or so out of that sticker book so that was worth the dollar, but it’s not that magical so eventually I was found by my offspring:
“Hey Dad!”, I need some cardboard boxes, she tells me.
I find some boxes I have laying around and fold them up and give them to her.
I get rewarded with a good 20 minutes of the zone and she’s happily turning them into houses with windows.
All good things come to an end and she finds me and wants to bowl in the family room?
“Bowl?”, I ask her. “As in Bowling?”.
She confirms I am not crazy and states that we can use her boxes as pins:
Oh, Okay. That will work - I guess.
“But what will we use for a ball?” I ask.
She shows me a wood easter egg.
“Egg shapes don’t really roll all that great”, I tell her
“That’s OK”, she tells me
So., we bowl.
We sit on the bottom step to the family room and take turns trying to roll an oval shaped egg across the room to knock down our bowling castle.
This took a while, as one can imagine.
I don’t think I have ever laughed as hard as her trying again and again and again to knock down a cardboard box. She would roll the egg and it would stop with just enough force to not knock down anything. If you tried to do this you would not be able to if you tried.
But she did, again and again and again.
I’m no expert egg-roller either so I can’t laugh too hard as a lot of my turns to bat came up empty.
In the end we were at a tiebreaker of 41-41 and technically I won, but she corrected me that the player with the lowest score wins and I have to tell you that her logic makes sense as the misses were more than the hits so it only makes sense that when playing bowling with cardboard castles and oval eggs as the ball - that the scoring would be upside down too.
But that’s how we roll around here - you never know the path the day will take.
Keeping the ball in our lane,
TH and Co.