Oh, what will this year bring?

Wii, Wii, Wii, all the way home

January 29, 2008 on 11:31 am | In Paul | 5 Comments

It’s only January and I have already taken the title Best Mom 2008. My award-winning accomplishment? Acquiring the hard-to-find Wii game system while in Florida and schlepping it home to Paul. He was mildly interested in my return; he was ecstatic to see the Wii. He hugged the Wii; he did not hug me.

The story of the Wii starts back in September when Paul’s TV broke. It was old, inexpensive to start with, and had been well used. He claimed he wanted to replace it and would save his money, plus use his Christmas money to buy a new one. In November, he was still talking about getting a new TV so I decided to give him a gift card to Best Buy for Christmas. Since I was having a terrible year, financially speaking, I used points I had accumulated at my bank so I didn’t have to lay out any cash to give him a $200 gift card. I was pretty excited about giving him such an extravagant gift, especially because it had been so painless to me.

By the time Christmas came, offers for used but workable free TVs had come Paul’s way so he changed his plan: he wanted a Wii instead. On Christmas Day, he was excited to receive his gift card and started checking the Best Buy site and calling to find out when they would get some in stock. It turns out that they hadn’t had any for weeks, maybe months, with none arriving any time soon. Paul started looking at other places to buy a Wii.

“If I find a Wii at Wal-Mart, can I sell you the Best Buy card for $200?” he asked.

Hmm, my beautiful thrifty plan was about to go out the window. If I did that, then I’d have to lay out the $200 in cash I had been avoiding, plus end up with a card I didn’t want.

“What would I want at Best Buy?” I asked. He knew this was the flaw in the plan suggested that I could buy games, like Guitar Hero, that I could play on his Wii. Uh huh.

Then a bit of luck came my way. One of my co-workers in Florida, Dexter, had bought several Wii units (at Wal-Mart in the middle of the night when the shipments came in) and had been selling them on eBay for a tidy profit. One Wii had been refused in shipping and returned to him. Through some high finance wheeling and dealing with Dexter, I managed to swap Paul’s Best Buy gift card for the Wii, and thus I toted home a brand new Wii, never letting it out of my sight, when I returned from Florida.

It was nearly midnight when I arrived home but Paul rushed to greet the Wii enthusiastically.

He pulled it out of the box and hooked it up to his TV (donated to him by his grandmother).

“Oh baby! Oh baby!” he kept calling out enraptured as he plugged in the cables.

When it powered on, he was ecstatic.

“I’m going to marry Dexter!” he hooted, then quickly added “No homo! No homo! Oh yeah, I’m gonna marry Dexter! (No homo! No homo!)”

On the setup screen he had to assign a name to the Wii. He was in such a hurry to try the boxing game, he just put in his first initial, and moved on.

“You named it P?” I asked. “The name of your Wii is P-Wii?”

I was starting to wonder if all this had been a good idea.

“Oh yeah,” he insisted, “I’m playing with my P-Wii!”

Paul started up the boxing game and enthusiastically punched at the screen. Of course, he was a natural.

“OK, my turn,” I said when he had been declared the winner. He showed me how to work the controllers, the remote in one hand and the nunchuk in the other. I jabbed at the screen with the intense fury, danced like (Laila) Ali, and trash-talked just like I’d heard him do so many times.

“My God, Mom,” he said incredulously, “you’re a maniac!”

Since that night, I have obtained my own controllers and three additional games. Paul and I have cleared the furniture from the living room and hooked up P-Wii to the big TV. We play every night: boxing (he has to remember to aim low because I’m short), bowling (we’ve discovered some moves that would never work with a real ball), tennis (I’m not the next Venus Williams), and a shooting game (he’s too fast on the draw for me). I have to admit he wins most of the time but some days I don’t suck as badly as others.

I really didn’t understand what all the Wii fuss was about, but now that I’ve played it, I get it. It’s the first game system I’ve been able to play in years, since they improved the other systems into a level of complication I can’t understand. This thing is so easy. And fun. Really fun.

I might be getting a Wii bit addicted.