Are Wii There Yet?

Just before last Christmas, Mom bought a Wii for our house. She may not be aware of this, but I had been leaving her subliminal messages encouraging her to by a Wii a month or so before she finally did so. I spent several weeks of the summer leaving positive comments about Netflix on my Facebook to convince Mom to sign up with them, so I figured I could do something similar (though my efforts were more covert this time) so I wouldn't have to borrow my brother's Wii when the next Zelda game comes out (I've been saving up for it for quite a while now).

When she finally bought one, I was just a bit surprised - I hadn't expected her to go for it before Christmas, and I hadn't expected Dad to agree so easily. Turns out, he hadn't - she bought it on the fly while she was at Target, and we were going to hide it in the guest room so he wouldn't see it.

After a few weeks, when Dad was out one night, Mom told me to pull it out and set it up. She got one of the new sleek black ones (I really liked the original white, but I don't see anything wrong with black either), and I set it up right next to our black TV where my brother's had been when he still lived with us, and where my other brother's PS3 had been when he lived with us. We figured out the Netflix channel for the Wii and got all the packaging put away before Dad came home. And then, for about a month or so, we said nothing about it. We didn't draw attention to the Wii, or mention it, and we made sure the controller was always tucked away where Dad didn't see it.

We weren't trying to be mean to him or anything - if we had just told him, I'm sure he wouldn't have minded much, since it ended up not being very expensive. But by not talking about it, hiding the Wii became a sort of game; how long could we go before Dad noticed the Wii? He never said anything about it, and when he wanted to watch an old movie on Netflix he would turn on his old laptop (which we have hooked up to use the TV as a 2nd monitor), so we were pretty sure he hadn't noticed yet, or at least wasn't sure what to make of it.

Which means that, for the most part, we didn't use the Wii for the first few months after getting it. Well, I did, when I was home alone, but we couldn't use it to watch Netflix when Dad was home or he'd figure us out.

Finally, a few weeks back, Mom decided we needed to get Verizon FiOS (I think, with all her kids moving out, she's decided she wants to finally conform to social/technological norms. One day, she might get an HD TV, or maybe even a flat screen!). I don't care much for cable TV - anything I really want to watch can be found on Hulu - but cable has a few channels she can access whenever she wants, so on a Saturday, a Verizon cable guy came in and set out whole system up, which included figuring out wiring for everything plugged into the TV. Like our single rarely-used game system.

So Dad found out - I guess. He never really did say anything, but afterward he started using the Wii. Nonchalantly, Mom asked him when he had started using it, and he vaguely replied "when you got it," because of course he expected us to know what that meant. Mom didn't push the subject.

So I fully expect Dad some day to find this blog and discover that we utterly deceived him - but I hope he can find it a good laugh. We weren't trying to deceive you, we were trying to get more amusement out of the Wii than we could otherwise. We own no games for it (Expect for Wii Fit, which we just bought a month ago), so what else are we going to do with the thing? I'm happy we managed to get some entertainment from it; I always hated getting the toys I always wanted for Christmas only to discover a week later that I didn't care for them anymore. Now, this Wii will never get old (Until, of course, the newer thing comes out).

(In retrospect, I wonder if Mom and Dad were playing me, seeing how long I'd go along with the gig. Not to be rude, however, but I wouldn't give them that much credit.)