Bow and arrow

After watching Brave, Robin Hood and the Chronicles of Narnia Noah has been bugging me to get him a bow and arrow. I made a really crappy one late at night out of PVC pipe, but it sort of worked. This morning I started looking up how to do it online and found Nick the Backyard Bower, who makes real bows out of PVC pipe.

Anyway, I decided to make these bows. And then when I got to Home depot and found that they didn't have the fiberglass rods, I decided to make child sized crappy bows (I didn't know they would be crappy) with another substance that bent more than pvc pipe. Unfortunately that meant that they didn't snap back. So it didn't really work in the woods. Which is probably a good thing because Noah was constantly aiming his "arrows" at me. I really liked these grassy reeds because they were straight and went sort of far but are hollow and don't do much damage. Again, Noah ever actually hit me and I did try to get him to shoot out into a frozen pond, but it's nice as a back up that the thing is not an arrow in anyway. At home we were shooting our foam noodle swords. As it so happened I brought along the crappy original bow made of a thinner pipe than in the video. My main problem was I tried to tie the string to a wire which was duct taped to the pipe. I tried to do it the way Nick did in his video and ended up with a sort of real bow.  I mean I actually shot some sticks even though I have no idea what I am doing. Noah was much happier with his child sized bow that didn't work and didn't even want to try mine, which is good I guess. I don't feel so bad about buying that pipe now. Plus the main reason I wanted to sort of do archery is that archers have a strong upper body and I figured doing that sort of practice was more useful than exercises  that were only to strengthen and not to shoot and otherwise entertain... especially for four year olds. You will notice that although Nick does not look in shape at the waist, he is jacked when it comes to the upper body... most noticeable that lats (lats?) the muscles that form the "iron fan" in Chinese terminology, or when you add it to a thin waist, then the "Tiger waist and bear back" Fu yew hung bui. Nick definitely has the Hung bui. This muscles are what we go for in White Crane and then we work on our horse stance of course, which if you use a Long Bow, I think you also use (though I know nothing about archery really) 

But anyway, we have a functional kiddy bow in the house now, and I still hope to make Nick's simple bow. His other stuff looks really cool too, but realistically, it ain't happening for me anytime soon. I mean what was great, is Noah actually helped me make the bows today. I got so excited about all this and all my childhood  memories of trying to make this stuff with no guidance came rushing back. My mom had tried but Youtube didn't exist back then, and to be fair, the pretend bows are a lot like what she made, though hers looked better as it was made of wood. And me and my friend definitely came up with something similar to the functional bow we now have. Though we had no place to shoot it. And we actually ended up putting hole in my room's wall. But Noah has an early start on me. He has his bow at age four. In any case, this was a fun Sunday afternoon activity, and something to continue for the next two days, as he will have no school on St. Patrick's Day or a teacher's professional day or some such thing. Apparently Nick has written some books too. I might have to check those out. Though I bet all I will end up making is the bow I have now, with thicker pvc.