Game On

- Julie O'neill

“MOM, CAN I GET A VIDEO game system?”

A typical request from an eight-year-old. But not my eight-year-old. My son Cade’s question startled me.

“You know, like a Wii or something,” Cade went on, referring to the Nintendo home video game system that lets players control action on the screen by waving their hands. “It’s active. My friend has one, and it’s cool.”

Active. That summed up Cade—our whole family, really. Living in central Oregon, close to mountains and trails, we were outside year-round. My husband, Cory, and I went on a two-week backpacking trip on our honeymoon. We took Cade and his younger sister, Rebekah, on hikes from the time they were babies riding on our backs. Cade loved playing soccer and mountain biking with his dad and climbing trees. We didn’t have a TV. Well, we had a tiny, 13-inch that was Cory’s before we married, but it was buried in the hall closet.

I never expected either of our kids to ask for something so…indoorsy. It’s not as if we had some high-minded philosophy against TV or video games. We just sort of fell into living that way. When the kids were little, we belonged to a house church with several other like-minded couples. The moms always met at the park or somewhere else outside. We loved how creative and resourceful our kids were without TV to keep them occupied. They put on plays, built forts, made racetracks in the dirt.

Did we really want to give Cade a reason to stay indoors? He explained that all his friends had video game systems and the Wii was the best one because you could play sports on it and keep moving. He seemed pretty insistent.

Christmas was approaching. Cory and I talked it over and decided to get Cade a Wii.