Bumper Bowling

Today Kara took the kidlets and met their friends Maria, Daniel and David at the mall where they bowled. I went along to help with crowd control. Bentley, Jake, and Viva have played Wii bowling, but they'd never set foot in a bowling alley before. It was an adventure.

The smallest size of shoe the alley had was a size 8, which was fine for both Bentley and Jake, but not so great for Viva. Even with two pairs of socks, the shoes were two or more sizes too large. Fortunately she was sporting a particularly cute hairdo today, so no one had any cause to look at her oversized feet.

Daniel and David are old pros at bumper bowling so they led off. Then Bentley, Jake, and Viva gave it a try. Viva scored a spare her first time out. She then scored another one and a third one! She was doing quite well, so I'm not sure why her mom decided to introduced her to the ramp (see photo). She quite liked the ramp, so she chose to use it for the rest of the game and she did not do as well, although with three spares at the start of the game she had a lead that none of the boys could overtake. (Viva is the only one who used the ramp.)

The bowling balls the kids used were six pounders. The boys could lift them quite easy and Viva managed it, too, but it was more difficult for her. The kids enjoyed bowling and were eager to take their turns. For the first half of the game things went pretty smoothly, but then they discovered the reset button on the side of the ball return and that was pressed a couple of times. In addition to that, the automatic scoring function at the alley had some problems. It scored a spare for David even though two pins were left standing and Bentley was credited with a strike with three remaining pins. Very odd.

Bentley says he's going to get his dad to take him bowling on their next adventure date.