We hear a lot about tetherball in our house. The boys play at school a lot, and have both been itching to play me.<\/p>\n
So, naturally, we bought them a tetherball set for Christmas. I set it up in the backyard after they went to bed on Christmas Eve.<\/p>\n
They were thrilled when they saw it – and ready to challenge their dad.<\/p>\n
My oldest was up first. I explained that height is a huge advantage in tetherball, but he’d apparently been playing the gym teacher at school, and he said he was ready.<\/p>\n
He served. I hit it back. He threw up one hand to block it, then smashed the ball with his other hand.<\/p>\n
“Woah!” I said. “No fair. You can only hit it once.”<\/p>\n
“Na-ah. This is how we play at school.”<\/p>\n
The argument went back and forth a few times before I called a halt.\u00a0We went to the computer, pulled up the World Tetherball Association web page and read the official rules.<\/p>\n
Sure enough, you can only hit the ball once when it’s on your side. You also can’t hit it with anything other than a hand or a forearm, and you’re not allowed to hit the rope. Finally, any foul – even one – results in immediate forfeiture of the game.<\/p>\n
Educated, we went back out to the court.<\/p>\n
He immediately forgot and hit the ball twice.<\/p>\n
“One game for me,” I said.<\/p>\n
“Aaah!”<\/p>\n
During the next game, I missed a hit and the ball smacked into my middle.<\/p>\n
“It hit your belly!” he shouted. “I win!”<\/p>\n
“What?”<\/p>\n
“It’s not your hand or your forearm. You hit it with your belly. That’s not allowed.”<\/p>\n
Oof. Insult and injury all rolled into one. “You’re right.” I said. “You win.”<\/p>\n
“My turn!” his little brother said.<\/p>\n
“Just aim for his belly,” my oldest said. “That’s how to beat him.”<\/p>\n
Sheesh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Whoever wrote the rules to tetherball needs a serious talking to. I can’t believe this is a valid strategy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[118,120,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-embarassing","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-sN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1785\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}