Ping Pong

Did I tell you we got a ping pong table for Christmas? My sweetie loves game tables and over the years we have had quite a few of them including air hockey, pool, and skeeball. Most of these have eventually gone the way of the big dumpster after the kids have played them to death. (Actually it's not that simple. First they have to get broken, but not badly enough that my sweetie will let me throw them directly into the trash. Then they sit in the garage for several years waiting to be fixed first...)

But I digress.

A goofy pic of me and Gamer. Nothing to do with ping pong.

We set up our new ping pong table downstairs in the family room. Thankfully, this one folds up so we don't have to dedicate that much space to it all the time. We had our very first tournament on Christmas Day and the kids were shocked that I am actually pretty good at ping pong.

What they didn't know was that I had played hundreds of games of it as a child. My parents didn't have the funds or the space for a real ping pong table, but we had an awesome kitchen table! It was oval shaped and the chairs were attached to it. They did not have legs that sat on the floor. (I looked and looked through Google Images to find a picture of the table that is still in my dad's house, but apparently it was a Utah thing and they just don't exist anymore.) We had a little detachable net and a couple of paddles and we spent hours playing ping pong in our kitchen.

It was a little trickier than our official ping pong table. It wasn't quite as wide and of course we didn't have lines on it (although we did put them on a few times with masking tape, but Mom didn't like it). The biggest difference was the rounded corners. Balls that would have been perfectly legal on our real table just ended up on the floor in the kitchen.

Point being, I learned to play a really tight game right down the middle. The kids were all annoyed that I won the tournament, but I reminded them that I was playing with a huge disadvantage...We didn't have the chairs that couldn't be removed (like our old kitchen table) to trip over.