More toys

We have a Wii that my wife bought back when they first came out (she was actually able to get one at retail price without having to camp out for three days in a Walmart parking lot), which is fun and the kids enjoy playing with it too. But just this past weekend, she bought the Wii fit game and balance board. So of course we had to play around with it over the weekend.

It has two different skiing games (or at least those are the only two I've seen so far), one that is a slalom through gates and the other that is a jump. Now, I love to ski and although I admit I am certainly no expert, I can make my way down the slope and go where I intend to go most of the time. But in this slalom game, it is so sensitive to movement that I found myself just all over the place and couldn't get through the gates to save my life. I think at my best I still missed at least 5 gates.
But the jump, I got that pretty good. All you have to do on that one is duck down a bit and lean forward so that your weight is distributed a certain way to pick up speed as you go down the hill, then, when you hit the jump point, you have to stand up straight (quickly) and stay as still as you can. If you do those things, you'll get a good jump score.

I was never able to get a score of more than one star (which it seems has a rank of "unbalanced", maybe "unhinged" was the word they were looking for...) on the slalom, but got three stars right off the bat in the jump.

We've just used it the one time so far, but it can calculate your weight and after you tell it how tall you are, also calculates your BMI. We got the whole family registered on it, confirming what I already knew, my wife and kids both fall right in the middle of the "normal" range and I'm in the "underweight" category. So I set a goal for my character to put on a few pounds in a couple of weeks. We'll see how that ends up going.

It should provide a little extra motivation though, as it plots how you are doing and you can see your trends over time. Now I just have to remember to use it at least once every week (preferably three times)