Family: March 2008 Archives

After seeing the crowds of people camped out the day after Thanksgiving I vowed to myself that I would not be caught up in Wii-mania. After all I am not much of a game player whether it is on the computer or on a console. I mean I have not seriously sat down and played a computer game since the Atari 2600 came out. Oh the days of Pong, now there was a real game! My kids of course think I am crazy as they would never even classify that as a video game. But just because I am not a game aficionado does not mean that my kids have grown up deprived of electronic goodness. Quite the contrary, I think we have owned pretty much every game system developed or at least it seemed that way. There was Nintendo and Super Nintendo, there was Ninetendo 64 and XBOX. I think at one time we had a Sega and I am not positive but I think there was a Playstation briefly in the house too. Last Christmas all Dakota wanted was an Xbox360 so now we have that too. And when the kids received Guitar Hero III, they spent their entire Christmas break strumming and rocking away. But after watching Trina who is much more coordinated than I am struggle to press buttons and flick the guitar (which only comes right-handed by the way what is up with that?) I decided to keep what remaining dignity I had and gracefully decline the children's offer to play. But I truly thought we were finally up-to-date with game consoles and therefore would not be having to deal with the Wii phenomena; as always I was wrong.

Every year I eagerly await the passing of St. Patrick's Day. It is not that I have anything against St. Patrick's Day it is just that I know that once that is over it can mean only one thing; Easter is just around the corner. Easter is like a ninja holiday. You never quite know when it is going to show up then BAM! there it is. I often wondered why we had an Easter Bunny. It would have been much cooler if the icon would have been this little ninja guy. Any chicken who didn't give up eggs gets a couple of ninja stars to the beak. Wouldn't it be more believable to think of a ninja creeping into your house one night and hiding your eggs rather than a six foot rabbit without opposable thumbs? So you may be asking yourself, what is it about Easter that gets me so jazzed. Is it the religious implications? Could it be the celebration of the return of spring signifying a new beginning? Is it that I just have a thing for Easter bonnets? While any of these answers would be justification enough to love Easter (well maybe not that last one but the others are ok); these are not why I like the holiday so much.

I remember as a kid I always looked forward to my birthday. First off it was awesome to see my little brother cry because he wasn't getting the attention he wanted. Second, I usually got really cool stuff for my birthday. There was the baseball gloves and bats, the toy guns that always seemed to shoot some kind of projectile that would be banned using today's standards, and then there were the bikes. Early on it was a sting ray with ape hanger handlebars and a banana seat. Then it was a Schwinn 10-Speed road bike. Finally it was a carbon fiber downhill mountain bike. And then there were the cakes. My mom always made awesome birthday cakes with cool decorations. There were car cakes, baseball cakes, a Spiderman cake, and countless other shapes and sizes. About the only time I had a bad birthday cake was the year I wanted to make my own cake.