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.

Wii are having fun

Yeah, so my Sainted Mother-In-Law went overboard for our (early celebration of) Christmas and Jason's birthday and got us a Wii. We opened presents at about 9:30 Friday night, and Jason had that sucker set up on the in-laws' tv about 10 minutes later. Yeah, we're a little excited about it.

We spent yesterday recovering from the trip home, washing clothes and moving every single piece of furniture in our family room so there would be enough room to swing a Wii controller without knocking over anything or braining anyone. Our family room is 11 feet wide and 26 feet long, so making it look less like a bowling alley and more like an actual room was kind of on the agenda, too. How did we do?

You can't see the closest part of the room, where I've cleverly hidden the exercise bike and all of Liza's toys where you can't see them from upstairs. I'm a genius, I tell you.

The irony of all this rearranging is that we're trying to make the room look less like a bowling alley ... while setting it up for a game that turns our living room into a virtual bowling alley. Hmmm.

While you ponder that, check out the form on the kiddo, who hasn't gotten a strike yet but usually manages to remember which buttons to push to roll the ball, and who recently discovered the wonders of actually moving her Mii to correct her horrible left hook.

Where else can you play a game of bowling in bare feet and a satin costume dress?

Wait until I catch Jason unawares while he's playing Rock Band ... I'm clearing out space on my memory card for THAT video, let me tell you.