So, I thoroughly manipulated the system this last Christmas: anyone that asked, I told them I wanted Best Buy gift cards!  My goal was to have enough to get myself Kinect for my XBox 360 … mission accomplished!  And we are absolutely loving it!

I thought it would be fun; it’s been flying off store shelves for a reason and it’s not just buzz.  Every review out there talks about how amazing the technology is, but I didn’t realize just how true that was!  Watching my four sons play with it has absolutely blown me away.  They have the attention span of hummingbird, hopping in and out of games left and right – and the Kinect keeps track!  Automatically dropping them, recognizing them, adding them back into the game and more!  Zachary, our resident two year old, likes to wander back and forth in front of his brothers while they play – I thought this would destroy their progress and completely disrupt the camera based sensor but it completely ignored him, recognizing that he wasn’t one of the players!  I had read about it ignoring people’s cats, but a miniature human being?  Amazing.

On top of all that, it recognizes and identifies me, has voice recognition, and using gestures to navigate the XBox is a trip.  However, I should have never taught my sons the command words for voice recognition – they all try to out scream each other in efforts to wrest command of the XBox away from each other, or even worse, me.

The one down side?  I got so into a game that I jumped up into the air and hit my head on the low ceiling.  The boys thought it was hilarious.  Me?  Not so much!