My three-year-old is a handful. She has more energy than any toddler I’ve ever seen. Sometimes she just runs around in circles in the living room trying to use up what seems to be a never ending store of kinetic abundance.

The day I socked her in the eye (did I mention that I socked her really hard?), I had repeatedly asked her to settle down, and finally, in an attempt to bring the zany level in the house down to a calmer tone, I sat her down on the couch and told her if she patiently waited her turn, she would get a chance to play the new Xbox Kinect Dance Central game we adults were playing with.

If you haven’t seen the Xbox Kinect in action, you have to get to your local gaming outlet and sample the awesomeness of it. Now, I remember when that Pong video game came out back in the 70’s, so maybe I’m a little more enraptured then you genXers will be by this technology, but I am so in awe of the fact that this gadget requires no controllers — it knows where you are in the room and has the ability to accurately critique and improve your dancing skills (yes, it does).

To keep it real, let me just admit that all the technological advancement in the world isn’t going to teach me how to dougie, and I majorly sucked at the Soulja boy Supaman dance, but the youngins couldn’t touch me on the Commodores “Brick House” and I was just getting ready to kill Janet Jackson’s “Control,” when Jadyn got a little too enthusiastic about mommy’s performance, hopped off the couch and collided with an especially energetic move called “the ticker.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLZJ2Mr9JmI]

At the 43 second mark check out that potentially lethal “ticker” move and you’ll know why Jadyn is lucky mommy didn’t  knock her unconscious. (Note: that is not me dancing in this clip.)

If you want to see what it actually looks like for a kid to get royally clocked by their parent while playing with the Xbox Kinect, check out this shocking video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux1FZpPKh20]

Despite the hard lesson Jadyn and I learned together about space management and the presence of toddlers during a Kinect session (please, do feel free to learn from our mistake), I HIGHLY recommend this game. It is really a lot of fun to play with, it burns hundreds of calories an hour, and believe me when I tell you you will use muscles you didn’t know you had.

If every household in America had one of these, Michele Obama could consider the obesity problem among children in this country permanently eradicated. (Just be careful not to knock them silly in the process.)