MiiQuest 2011

If you have a Wii, and the game WiiFit Plus, you may share my pain.

If you don't, I'll fill you in.

When you get a Wii, you are encouraged to make yourself a Mii...a little computer animated representation of you which can represent your player in various games. You get to spend time picking an astounding array of characteristics: hair color and style, eye color and alignment, face shape, skin tone, even your eyebrows. Your little Mii for the most part jaunts through life very similar in build to every other Mii until it runs across WiiFit Plus, which is a fitness game. And I love it. The whole family loves it.

BUT.

My Mii? Not so much with the love.

You see, one of the first things you do in WiiFit Plus is a body test...which involves being weighed with the accompanying balance board. And if you're anything like me (or my husband, or my sister, or my neighbor), maybe on the less vigilant side of fit, as soon as you're done, your poor Mii plumps right up like the Pillsbury dough boy.

Boo. Hiss. (...and frankly, not great PR...someone, somewhere in the Nintendo organization consciously, purposefully made this decision and I am now going on record as saying you, nameless Nintendo minion...you are not my favorite.)

Lately my poor little rotund Mii has become a symbol for the many things I am not doing for me, myself and I. Important things. Things that need rectifying. NOW.

Hence The Quest.

(This all also may have something to do with the fact that 2011 is shaping up to be something of a landmark year for me. I will turn 40. My oldest progeny will turn 10, marking a full decade of unintended immersion in the home and others. My youngest will turn 5 and start Kindergarten, creating both a shining beacon of hope on the horizon and a deep seated pit of doom firmly lodged in my ego. But you know, I'd much rather blame Nintendo than enter years of psychoanalysis, so we're going with the Mii thing.)

The Quest has several components:

1) Rescue my Mii...and hopefully improve my own health and happiness along the way.

2) Rescue my ego. I believe this involves deciding what I want to be when I grow up, but really, I'm not sure.

3) Rescue my crafting. The joy needs to come back. The stress needs to go away. If I don't want to do it, I'm not going to let myself be pressured into it. You all are on notice that The Year of Selfish Crafting has begun.

4) Rescue my kids. OK, don't panic, they really don't need rescuing per say, they are really fabulous kids and are totally safe and very well loved. In terms of the larger household and family venue though, they do need to carry more of their own metaphorical weight, and really, I think that can totally be construed as saving them from themselves.

So.

Forward into the fray we go.