‘Wow’, exclaimed Katie when her father opened the special xmas gift he made for her. The gift was an album with collection of family photographs taken on Christmas over last 10 years. There were so many fond memories in each photograph with comments from her father. She couldn’t stop going through the album repeatedly and on her fourth trip she noticed a pattern.

Katie flipped the album quickly and what she noticed was beyond her imagination. Katie, a single mother of 11 year old son had just seen her 35th winter this Christmas. She was a very popular figure in the community due to her role as team leader for all kind of community events. Although she was aware of her growing age, she did not see herself growing as she just saw in the album. She noticed that in the last ten years, she had slowly turned into a copy of her mother. Her mother was always big and she remembered how some of her classmates used to make fun of her and her mother. Those were the days when she wished that her mother should loose weight and become a role model as they show in magazines and TV show Biggest Looser. While watching a documentary about foster parents, she thought of running away and imagined being adopted by very fit parents.

The photos in the album show her clothes size getting bigger every Christmas. It was not the weight which rang the alarm. The pattern over the years, which she noticed was the position of her son in the photographs.  With every passing year, especially in last 5 years he has moved away from her, always sitting or standing far from her. She thought that like every other teenager her son was going through difficult stage of life. But she could now sense that her growing size could be one of the major factor as that was the case of her childhood too. On the top of that she was a single mother too.

That could be too much to handle for a little child, she finally realised. She looked at her watch. With determination and definite desire to win her son back, she ran upstairs.

Oliver looked at the Nissan Micra parked outside and wondered what her mom was doing so early at home. May be she had came to pickup something for the weekend fair, he thought and entered the house. He followed the voices coming from living room and opened the door. He got a shock of his life when he saw her mother in trainers doing some aerobic stuff on his new WII FIT Game console.

‘Are you gone crazy? Mom’, he almost shouted. Katie was breathing heavily and took some moments to respond.  ’Don’t you like me to be fit?’, she asked. ‘Yes, I do’, replied Oliver with straight face.  ’Come on, then lets join me’, she said while offering the other console. That day they did aerobics, danced together and started the process of filling all the gaps created by her growing weight. Katie knew that with her determination and Oliver’s love she will reverse the pattern.