Wii, or Learning New Things

I got P a Wii for his birthday. I figured these will be the last birthday's we can get each other frivolous gifts. He was surprised to discover that I was a bit of an idiot savant when it came to most of the sports (except baseball -- my timing is terrible). I was not at all surprised.

When I was 16, I spent the summer living with a family in France. For the first week, the program sent us to Paris, where we stayed with a different family from the one with which we spent the remainder of our time. My first family had a son who was a year or so younger than I was (and a daughter a year older, but she had a job, so we mostly hung out at night, mostly)). One day he asked if I wanted to play Sega hockey, which he and his friends were really into, which sounded slightly more enjoyable than wallowing over the fact that my then-boyfriend was canoeing in the Arctic Circle for the summer and oh-how-I-missed-him. So we played. And even though I'd never played before, I beat him. Badly. The next day, he invited his friends over and bet them that I would beat them. And I did. This made us fast friends, since, well, I helped him hustle his friends.

So my eerie skill at Wii Sports in the face of my general incompetence at all things involving hand-eye coordination did not surprise me in the least. And my husband discovered that after 8+ years together, he could still learn something new about me.