Bowling, anyone?

Today was Daddy-Monkey day. It was the last day of school for him before they let out for Thanksgiving break, and I didn't have class until 6pm...so I kept him home for some quality time. We went to his OT appointment, had lunch at Dairy Queen, watched some TV, and then went bowling. Hoooo, yeah, bowling. Now THAT was some kind of fun!

We took the back way home from DQ, and I noticed the old bowling alley as we passed by. I thought about it for awhile, and figured it would be fun to get out there and bowl, so we headed off to a closer facility to give it a shot. It's a new place, and knew that it had an arcade and laser tag as well as bowling, so it seemed worth a look.

In no time at all, we're set up with a lane and some shoes. Honestly, I've never seen bowling shoes that small, but they plopped his right down on the counter next to mine like it was no problem. We headed off to our lane, put on the shoes, and then spent 10 minutes trying to figure out the scoring system keyboard. I finally got it to work well enough to put our initials on the overhead screen, and then we bowled our tails off!

Here are some things I learned today by watching my son learning to bowl:

1. With the bumpers up, almost any ball with the tiniest bit of forward momentum will probably make it all the way down to the pins and knock several of them over.

2. When you underhand a bowling ball as hard as you can, and it catches some air, it will land with a mighty THUD. Much to the delight of everyone around you.

3. After a mighty THUD, if a small person's ball gets stuck five feet away from the line, you might consider asking an attendant to go get it for you. The alleys are slippery, my friends. I mean "super-crazy-Wesson Oil-Vaseline-fall flat on your butt in front of everybody" slippery. And that's all I have to say about that.

4. Form is important. The little dude actually got a strike by imitating my follow-through.

5. Score, however, is truly unimportant. Watching my 5-year-old son throw his first ball down the lane is far cooler than any perfect game I might ever have a chance to bowl.

When our time was up, we played a few games in the arcade before heading home to doze on the couch in front of Lazytown. It was a pretty great day.

In other news, we're closed for the rest of the week. Even I need a break now and then, so we're having some heavy-duty family time, and then we'll get back to work next week. I'm still training for that half-marathon, though. My dear friend BB is working on an ailing calf muscle, so he'll probably not be able to run with me this time. However, he has said that he'll still come down to help me totter back to the van after the race and we can go have lunch.

Class was fun tonight...I had more folks than I expected come in this close to the holiday, and we worked on some good stuff. The grappling class is coming along well, although everyone there is pretty much at square one. That's OK...we've all got to start somewhere.