Seniors groups.
Empty Nesters.
Eight year-olds.
2 year olds?
Everyone has a preconceived notion about bowling. Maybe it’s the shirts and competitive cheering and jeering of a League team. Maybe it’s late night, black lit crazies. Or two lanes worth of elementary schoolers celebrating a birthday and racing back and forth from lane to arcade causing untold delays of game as someone has to go retrieve them.
But families with little kids? It’s that a recipe for trouble? Or at least an opportunity to get some nice rear-end shots of mom & dad as they help the little one roll the ball from between their legs and pray that it doesn’t stop rolling about halfway down lane (commonly known as “granny bowling”, but trust me, none of the seniors I saw last visit bowled like that!).
Actually, it was a lot of fun. My oldest is a 3 and a half year-old boy, my youngest was a mere 22 months. Plus, there’s this great invention called a “ramp”; strike up the Hallelujah Chorus, no more bowling balls taking eons to roll down the lane!
The boys had a blast until about the 7th frame, when my oldest just got tired of waiting his turn and decided he was done. So next time I think we’ll bring a few cars or a coloring book or something to help them make it through a full game. Or maybe we’ll be that group down on the end with a whole bunch of 2-3 year olds yelling “Kung-Fu Panda bowl” and punching the ball down the ramp. Or head-butting it…since some kids apparently have to learn the hard way that that’s not the best idea.
But I can tell you that we will be taking them again. It was fun, it was indoors (and in Florida, that’s big!) and it’s teaching the kids good sportsmanship – like cheering equally for strikes and gutterballs – and about a sport that most kids their age are told is not something for them. Maybe we’ll have a 2nd birthday party at a bowling center in a couple months for that reason alone.
Bowling…who knew it really is a WHOLE family thing?
~ Heather Schweich, Melbourne, FL
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