Phone Potato

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, is the sound I listened to as I blogged this blog morning. It was rhythmical and steady like heavy huffing and puffing and I called out at first to my grandsons to find out if someone was having an asthma attack. I quickly realized it was going on too steadily for that. What I found out was that my most recent ‘phone potato’ was taking a ride on my stationary bike! This and the fact that he was even awake on a summer morning (any time before noon) was pretty amazing, and he’d hopped on without any encouragement from me after yesterday’s historic three minute ride and increased his time by several hundred per cent. Maybe there’s hope for at least one phone potato yet!

Research has tied the use of cellphones to inactivity, giving rise to the name phone potato, loosely derived from the passé term, couch potato. Instead of exercising the remote, phone potatoes exercise their thumbs and my grandsons have spent the last couple of days doing just that, and I mean that literally because they now have phones. These are not your basic call in case of emergency type phones either. They have all the things I have no idea how to use called apps. The younger one keeps changing his wallpaper and sticking different memes in my face for me to chuckle over, his favorite being an astronaut on a spacewalk claiming that his nose itches. If only he was as dedicated to changing the appearance of his bedroom by picking up his discarded dirty clothes and putting them in the laundry basket as he is at flipping through various sites on his new phone looking to change his wallpaper or for things to post on Face Book.

Well, maybe they aren't becoming phone potatoes exactly, because I just saw one on his phone riding my stationary bike.