From the time my sons could recognize a ball, we have been rolling and throwing every sort of ball & eventually the frisbee, which they could both toss a good distance by the time they were waist-high to me. We also threw hatchets & knives, but that’s another story. I taught myself to juggle 3 balls because I wanted to offer that skill to them. Not well enough to busk for spare change on the walkway @ Venice Beach, but good enough to make it interesting. I started teaching it to them at elementary school age. They were junior gymnasts at the time (for the excellent cross-training) so I would juggle in the family area while they trained, then the three of us would juggle during their breaks. It became a regular thing at the gym for us to juggle and get some of the other kids to try it. The coach dug it as a peripheral. Cat got in a little trouble in 5th grade for juggling milk cartons in the lunch room, when one of them hit the ground and broke open, splashing a few of his pals and a girl who threw a fit about it. Now my juggling has slipped some & Cat has advanced past my skill, having taken it beyond the root (inside) toss & the tricks that stem off it to the outside toss or reverse cascade (a trick, not a root element), which I still struggle with. Another fun way to juggle is off a wall. Neither of us have been able to get alternating two balls simultaneously with both hands so 4 balls may be out of reach. If anybody’s going to juggle 4 balls, though, it’ll be Cat. He used to carry three koosh balls around (so did I, koosh are great for learning to juggle), but now he has 3 hakisak balls in his pocket so he can juggle whenever he feels like it. I can’t tell u how many times we’ve spent several hours at the park…going from catch with a baseball, to catch with a football, to seven-up & 21 basketball, to disc golf (not a set course but “call your hole” ~ a great excuse to walk a park), to trading-eights juggling 3 balls, to tennis, to flying kites if the wind is up, to flying a R/C plane (although the plane grew tiresome quickly with all the battery issues). They’re teens now; where did the time go? Those of you with young ones know the kick that it is. It’s fleeting though.
