There is a new game at Nini’s house now. It involves a rubber ball and several empty 1 liter bottles. I believe that it is supposed to be played something like bowling, but, as I discovered the other day, bowling for babies is quite different from bowling for adults.
For one thing, babies do not like to roll the ball. They prefer throwing or bouncing the ball at the “pins.” This is less effective than rolling, especially for babies with poor aiming skills, but it does have the potential to do more household damage, so you can easily see why this is the preferred method.
After throwing the ball unsuccessfully at the pins several times, babies then move on to the next phase of the game: holding the ball directly over the pins and dropping it. This also has a surprisingly low success rate among the babies that I observed. I was astonished to find that, even holding the ball mere inches away from the pins and dropping it directly into them, my baby still managed to repeatedly miss every single pin.
Luckily, things turned around eventually, and the ball did indeed knock over some of the pins. This was the cause of great delight, producing much giggling and jumping up and down. I set the pins up again, expecting another ball drop, but this was when things really began to deviate from standard bowling.
Upon realizing that the pins are not fixed objects, the baby proceeded to grab one of the pins in his hand and then, growling like a rabid dinosaur, started bashing down all the other pins with the one he was holding. “GRAWRGH! BLARGHRRL!” he said, knocking empty bottles to and fro. In the middle of all of this came the realization that he was now holding a club in his hand. A club that could be used for more general bashing. And so, bottle in hand, the baby went around the room, thumping anything and everything within reach. In baby bowling, this is referred to as a “strike.”
Overall, I would say that baby bowling was a big success, and we look forward to playing it many, many more times at Nini’s house, and never, ever any times at our house, because our house is where we keep all of our stuff, and Lord knows we have a hard enough time keeping any of it intact with just a regular baby running around. I’m not giving him a weapon.