So here’s the most random story I just remembered.

Well, I mean, it’s not really a “story”… but, whatever, it’s close enough.

So… here’s where it starts, I guess.

My best friend and I, circa 9 years old, are bored out of our minds on a Saturday afternoon. We’re sitting on the floor of my basement (on the carpet in the one finished room down there… the rest of the basement was uber-creepy so we would always be sure to turn on every light around and shut the door), basically just staring at the walls. And so I look around at the array of objects just laying around the room… an old boombox, a wad of yarn, an exercise ball, a toy gun, a sturdy enough table… and then (this is how great I am… kind of) I had an idea come to me.

I made up a game, one that would actually soon become a popular one among my whole group of friends and I.

So, here’s how it worked.

One person would stand on the table (it was probably actually a bit risky, but no one ever fell or got hurt) and hold the exercise ball to their stomach… and pretend to be pregnant (yeah, it doesn’t get much more random than this). The other player, then, would stand back on the floor, blindfolded with the yarn (it sounds complicated… but it actually worked pretty well) and hold the toy gun, which shot out little ping pong balls.

I don’t know if you can see where this is going yet… but that’s not all.

We would turn the boombox on to the radio, and the person pretending to be pregnant, standing on the slightly sketchy table, would dance to the music. And then the other person, blindfolded with the gun, would shoot the little balls at her, and got a ‘point’ for every time she actually shot her ‘pregnant belly’. We would also kind of use the radio as a timer, so every song acted as one round. And, after each round, we would switch places. And then we went on and on… until we got tired or hungry or something.

And, when I would have more than one friend over at a time, we even made the game multiplayer. So two people would be blindfolded, and we would just each take a handful of ping pong balls, and then whoever got the most hits in the round would win.

This game became really popular, too. Like, every time someone came over my house, they always requested we play this game at some point. And, even once I got into middle school and made more friends… I would always teach them the game right away, and everyone always loved it. Especially at my birthday parties.

Oh… and we called it ‘pregnant ping pong’.

And I’m sure if I called up any of my old friends and mentioned that name to them, they’d instantly laugh and remember the good times.

Why am I telling you all this, though?

Well, I think it can prove that creativity lurks everywhere, and… I just really wanted to.

So, that’s my dumb story of the day. Tell me in the comments what weird games, if any, you came up with as a kid! Or, if you’re planning to play pregnant ping pong at your next Halloween bash… or if you just thought it was a cute idea.

I’m even tempted to bring pregnant ping pong back at my next girls’ night in…

Until then, though!

-iKari 🏓