Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Guess what I got in the mail today?

I love love love love love love my balance board and Wii Fit. We hooked it up when Liza got home from preschool, and between setting up profiles for both of us and getting in 10 minutes of playtime each, we were on for close to two hours.

So far, I have learned that according to my BMI (and my jeans) I am slightly overweight, I'd need to lose about 25 pounds to be at my optimal BMI, and my "age" is exactly the same as my chronological age. It would be nice if it thought I was a nubile 18-year-old, but hey - at least it doesn't think I'm 70.

We've tried the slalom skiing game (oh my god, the suckiness of both of us), the hula hoop game (where I can hula with the best of them but keep getting bonked soundly in the head when they throw extra hoops to me, and Liza can't manage to get her hips to go in a circle unless I'm moving them for her), the Tree Pose (it's neat to see where your balance point is - gives you something to focus on until you fall over and crack your head open on a coffee table), and our favorite - the soccer game. Neither of us are particularly good at it - especially since Liza just rocks back and forth, back and forth, regardless of where the ball is on the screen - but we both find it hilarious when we get hit in the head by a soccer cleat, so that's motivating. I'm not sure who decided it was a good idea to include decapitated panda heads in the projectiles, but aside from the ick factor, that's pretty funny, too.

I'm actually looking forward to logging off the computer and going to play on it, which is something I have never thought about the exercise bike. That will wear off eventually, I'm sure, but in the meantime, bring on the decapitated pandas!

My only complaint so far is that I can't find an easy way to switch from one player to another - Wii Fit is pretty much designed for only one person to be using it at a time, as far as I can tell, which means that there's a lot of backtracking through menus to get to the change screen. We tempered that by having one of us play for five minutes, then switching and letting the other person play for five minutes. Like football, five minutes of game time is more like 10 or 15 minutes of real time, so it's not like we were buried in menus every time we turned around.

Now, if any of my readers out there have a Wii and are interested in purchasing a balance board, let me know - we ended up buying two of them, just to be sure we'd end up with one before Christmas. You wouldn't believe what a pain it was to find any of them - I thought we were going to have to buy one from a smelly guy on craigslist - and then all the sudden there was one at Circuit City and one at Amazon ... it was like winning the lottery.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Let us know how the BMI changes with time.

I started weight lifting over lunch in addition to my biking to work. Rather than losing weight, I gained another 10 pounds.

Yeah, I hear that muscle weighs more than fat, but it feels like a cop-out excuse.