Listening 30 – Listen for specific words

Some of my favorite childhood memories involve playing with my brother, David, who’s and a half years younger than me. We always got along really well and we had so much fun together. When we were growing up in the 90s, video games were starting to get really big, but my parents wouldn’t let us have them. We were each 30 minutes of computer time, and my mother would enforce that pretty strictly. But we didn’t feel too deprived – what we did instead was make up our own games, and we would get really .

We used to act out some of our favorite TV shows; for example, I would construct these ” impossible” quests for David, where he had to follow clues around the house and complete a list of by a certain time, otherwise there would be some dire consequence, like a bomb would go off – an bomb, of course. We also loved this program called “American Gladiators” which involved competitions and obstacle courses, and we would try to set up and recreate those challenges in the family room.

David went through a phase when he was a really bad . He used to get all cranky if he lost a game or a competition to me, and wouldn’t want to play anymore. So I came up with this where I’d take a piece of paper and make a scoreboard with the names of ten or twelve countries, and I’d say that it was the Olympics.

Each time we played a game or took a in some contest, we would pull a slip of paper out of a with the name of one of the countries, and that would be the country we would represent – so whoever won the game, any we won would be given to that country.

So it took the focus off the competition between my brother and me, and made it a competition among the countries instead. And it – David was happy to compete in the Olympics, and he was no longer upset when he lost.

One of our favorite games was playing balloon volleyball in the family room. At the time, the room had this big open in the middle, so it was perfect and we’d play for hours on end. Later on, my parents actually remodeled the family room and we were so that the new arrangement of the furniture was going to do away with our volleyball court, that we wrote them a petition asking them not to the room!

I remember one time we were playing and David the balloon towards me pretty hard, and it went my head. I jumped up and my fingers just barely tipped the balloon, but I deflected it to make it hit a lamp and break it.

Our mom heard the noise and came in to see what happened, and my brother and I both pointed a blaming each other for it. To this day we still argue playfully about whose fault it was that the lamp got broken. But we really enjoyed each other’s and we had a blast together as kids.