When Evelyn said she wanted a Fitbit for Christmas, I thought it was a little silly. I’m generally a pretty low-tech person, so it seems silly to give a kid an electronic gadget that *couldn’t possibly* be interesting to her. I was worried she just wanted it as a status symbol. I figured the best case scenario was that she paraded it in front of her friends for a couple of weeks and then forgot about it, making it a total waste of money.

Boy was I wrong.

We’re two months in and let me tell you, no one has EVER used a fitbit more than Evelyn. She checks it *constantly*. She tells me about 5 times a day how many steps she has, and what kind of cool smilies her fitbit has shown her. She keeps a paper log in her room with her “records”, separated by school and non-school days, and she exclaims things like, “Yay, we have gym today! That’s like 1000 extra steps!”

And seriously with those smilies, she’s sure she knows what every one of them means. “Oh, when I’ve gotten XXX steps it gives me the sunglasses, but if it thinks I haven’t been walking enough in the past hour it sticks its tongue out at me.” I’m not 100% sure she knows it isn’t alive.

Forget losing it; she keeps it at her side from sun up to sundown. It hardly goes 30 seconds without her taking a look to see what she’s up to. She gets mad when she can’t clip it to her ballet outfit.

I had no idea how many steps kids take in a day. I mean, I know she’s running around at school and everything (and her legs are shorter than mine!), but she has 300 or so steps by the time she comes upstairs in the morning. How is that even possible? What is she doing down there, pacing her room like a cheetah at the zoo??

Well, she might be. She walks while she reads, she walks up and down the hallway when she has spare time, and she asks to take the long way home. She has literally cried when we took the car to piano instead of walking, on account of all the steps she was going to miss out on.

Sara and I have figured out how to capitalize on all of this, though. “Hey Evelyn, will you run this downstairs for me? You’ll get some extra steps!” or “Hey Evelyn, can  you run the compost over to the garden? You’ll get some extra steps!” Sometimes it’s just, “Why don’t you run up and down the hall a few times and get some energy out get a few extra steps?” Works. Every. Time.

The only downside is that she is SO obsessed with it, that now Ollie is starting to say HE wants one…