I'm Scared of My Wii Fit

My mother, bless her heart, always gives me what she calls "mad money" at Christmas, a tradition passed down from her parents. It is to be spent frivolously, for something I'd like to have but cannot otherwise justify. This year, it paid for a Wii Fit.

I had no problem finding one. Despite rumors of shortages, and our local Fred Meyer saying they wouldn't have them for weeks, I found one the day after Christmas and brought it home. I was intimidated just to carry it; it was technological, it was new, it involved joysticks of some kind.

But the kids were surprisingly intrigued by my purchase. They cheerfully unwrapped it and set it up in our basement in front of the big screen and set about connecting our Miis to it (avatars based on us created for the Wii Sports we'd played earlier). Later they coaxed us all downstairs to get a body reading so that our avatars would shrink or expand to approximate our "before" bodies, something more than a bit embarrassing.

I got on it for all of two minutes.

My plan was to experiment on it when the kids were at school, fumbling around like the technophobe I am, without slick experts at hand to laugh when I pressed the wrong button or discover my Wii Fit age was 64. But they never seemed to be at school.

Of course, it was winter break when I got it, but then there was snow, and sickness and god knows what, and the only people using it were my seventeen year-old son who grew more muscular and adept at yoga by the day, and our fourteen year-old daughter who scores a perfect posture award every time.

Fortunately for my own fitness plans, I continued walking swiftly up- and downhill every day for 35 minutes, so that my failure to tackle the Wii Fit didn't mean my health demise.

Someday soon, though, they'll all be out of the house for a few hours (our daughter goes back to public school in the fall, after her two years of homeschooling, just like her older bro), and I will attempt to step onto the platform and get Wii Fit. I might not even have to wait for fall, if I'm lucky, and the sun is in the right house, and I pray to the appropriate pagan gods.

Until then, uphill I go, leaving the Wii Fit to the kids.