First Time Bowling

Hunter went bowling for the first time today. It was one of those spontaneous trips - his 11-year-old cousin came over to spend the night and we thought it would be a fun way to spend the evening.

The place had shoes to fit little kids, but no balls that he could actually handle. The smallest size (a six) was pretty heavy and bulky for the little guy, although he did surprisingly good anyway.

Using the bumpers, he was actually ahead of some of us for a little while! I tried various techniques to help him to get the ball down the lane (since it was too heavy for him to throw it the proper way), including rolling it between the legs, rolling it from the side of his body, or doing a sort of sideways "toss". None worked all that great (the ball rolled very slowly down the lane), but by the end of the night he seemed to have figured out his own technique for getting it down there.

A few times I was afraid that with his "tossing" technique he was going to accidentally toss it into our neighbors lane (which he actually intentionally tried to bowl on at one point), which I don't think would have been viewed as humorous since our neighbors on both sides were pretty good, and pretty serious about their game.

All in all, he really enjoyed the game. At first he was pretty antsy waiting for his next turn (see picture above, of him staring at the screen waiting for his name to pop up). But after a while he was fine with rolling his ball, watching it go down the lane, and then happily skipping back to his seat for a piece of pizza.

He didn't learn all that much this night about how to bowl properly, but he did have a really fun time and learned some rules of the game (like the goal of the game [getting the ball down the lane to knock over the pins], how many points a strike is worth [which he got one time, by the way!], and courtesy rules [i.e., don't bowl in your neighbors lane, stay off the floor when it's someone elses turn, etc.]). I wish that they would have had smaller balls, so he could really learn how to play, but I'm not too worried about it since we have enough on our plates right now of things to learn! Perhaps one day, when he's a bit older and more fitted to the ball, he will be able to take up this fun game!

"And he took his staff in his hand, and chose him five smooth stones out of the brook, and put them in a shepherd's bag which he had...And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it, and smote the Philistine..."

1 Samuel 17:40,49

Hunter is 3 years, 11 months old