It's gonna have real strings and everything

There is a piece in my puzzle that doesn't quite fit. Somewhere deep within my almost crunchy, granola, tandem nursing, babywearing, sewing, baking, and all things mothering persona lies a GAMER.

I love video games. If you can drive it, shoot it, smack it down, or blow it up, I'm all over it.

Karaoke, dancing, guitar, drums, whatever. I love that too. In fact, the only thing I'm not really a fan of are the games that have the first person vision - you know, when it's like you are looking over the gun? Not a fan.

Also, not really a fan of the Wii.

I know. Blaspha-freaking-mee. I can't help it. There are multiple problems with it. The first being that Mal Mal can whoop me at just about everything there is, and that completely goes against the grain of my competitive nature.

The second is that I'm a total klutz, and being able to do amazing things with my thumbs? That was a good thing for me. I LIKE the thumb controllers. This whole get-up-and-really-do-the-motion thing isn't really good for me and my lack of grace.

Of course, there is an exception, and that would be the Wii Fit. I kind of dig getting to see the little yellow circle on the yoga poses and feel myself getting better aligned. That's nice.

I digress.

For middle school graduation, we bought Mal Mal a copy of Beatles Rock Band for the xBox. I was thinking we already had the guitars, but I was wrong. The guitars I had were for the PS2, which is deader than dead. So, we headed to Game Stop yesterday to trade in all my old PS2 stuff and get some gear for the xBox.

Don't you love how I'm just now getting to the point of this story?

Here I am, mama and stepmama to my three beautiful children. I've got my littlest in a lovely ring sling, looking all peaceful and attached, and what am I doing? Why, I'm dumping out my bag of PS2 games - most of which are ridiculously inappropriate for a house with kiddos. The dude raised his eyebrow at me and almost sounded scolding when he told me that they didn't sell Grand Theft Auto San Andreas in their store. What can I say? I like to shoot things. In games. Just in games.

The funniest thing though was when he tried to convince me to wait and buy Rock Band 3 because, "It's just like learning to play real instruments." His pitch was that the guitars had REAL strings and the keyboard had something like 34 KEYS!

Heh.

He had no way of knowing that my other oddly shaped puzzle piece is the part of me that performs and records. Sure, I like playing Rock Band, but I don't think I need the REAL fake guitars and the REAL tiny keyboard.

I just found it funny.

Okay, so there actually isn't a point to this story. I'm just trying to get back to the writing. And for the second straight night in a row, Colin has actually gone down by himself, leaving me to type freely.

Of course, I could be playing a game instead . . .