Bowling.

29-09-10

Jack and I play a lot of games together. Mostly it's things like hide-and-seek or chasing each other. Lately he's been favoring Bakugan and other battle type games.

Video games are a fairly regular activity. Generally he prefers to sit on my lap and watch as I play his game choices on the PSP. Sometimes he'll have a go himself, he struggles with the coordination required but he's getting better.

For the last couple of days he's been asking to play bowling on the Wii. He's no stranger to the Wii games, I think he likes them because he understands how to play them, he's tried them all but prefers bowling and boxing.

So today he asked me if we had time to play bowling before he went to bed. I agreed and we fired up the Wii. Forty minutes or so later we'd played through 4 frames and Jack was averaging 160. Now I know how to play the sport, I'm relatively well practiced and I only average about 180... I said I was practiced I didn't say I was very good. Out of the four frames played Jack beat me twice, all be it only by 5 pins or so each time but a win is a win. His highest score was 170, beating my 166. As I began to realize how well he was doing I flicked on my video camera on my phone and recorded a few of his shots.

I don't know how he does it, he just flails his arm about and the ball just gravitates to the pins.

Every father dreads the day when his son surpasses him in some capacity. We're forced to accept that one day our prodigies will clobber us, they grow bigger, stronger and older, and we just get older. For most fathers it's football or basketball. In my case it's more likely to be Mario Kart, Halo or Counter-strike and I fear that it may be sooner than I'd expected.