Techno-baby

The headless hacker

Now, I know what the research says about kids and screens. It's been around since I was a kid (as if we needed another reason not to watch Teletubbies [cute as the baby  in the sun was]). We all know that kids under the age of three shouldn't look at screens.

But whatever. Joseph loves my laptop.

g8n yt  gfcgv gjfzdfcv  i,iuigu6fgyyhgnb nb h     hniy nb8h v  h bnm99oijk  mcjn m m  jk;ghc6gv gj  gvv6

only nearly headless, I suppose.

See what I mean?

I have mixed feelings about it. I mean, on one hand, it's hilarious what kind of changes he can make, but there's an alarm that goes off saying "bad mom bad mom babies shouldn't look at screens."  But I figure, we do a lot of other stuff, like reading stories, singing songs, playing piano, playing outside, folding laundry, tickle torture, and playing with friends, so a little bit of time with my laptop is okay. And if it's not, oh well.

Anyway, back to Joseph and my laptop. They have so much fun together. Here are a few of my favorite tricks:
-He loves seeing pictures of people on the screen. I think skype and video chat have really reinforced that. What this means is whenever he sees a picture (especially of himself) he gets excited and lunges toward it. (Incidentally, I'm wondering how confused he'll be about movies being real since they show up on the same laptop screen as grandmas.)
-He likes to press the keys. And pull them, come to think of it. I've had to stick a few numbers back on. But if you press enough keys, you can get some really random ones. Special characters and whatnot. One time while in Microsoft Word he opened equation editor and the next thing we knew he had informed us that A=pi r^2.
-Another popular key combination is ctrl v. I find urls, printscreens, and pictures of Joseph pasted throughout the document I'm working on.
-Even though I only have a laptop mouse that I use with my finger, he's pretty good at it. Especially picking things from the right-click menu. To illustrate: He opened up a folder with pictures from graduation, selected one, and set it as my desktop background. Yeah.
-and while he was at it, he renamed an icon on my desktop "jmo 9ihumn8hmkn878uh   mnmn  mikh    ftfht bgv5h6f65gfe56dc vnh gctyctbf vhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhvb6h tf  z czs vcf vge54d55frt3" and I actually thought it was rather fitting.
-my favorite, though, is when I decide that he's had enough fun and turn the monitor off. Suddenly the screen turns into a mirror! He starts smiling and laughing at the cute baby, lunges toward hpesoJ, and the next thing we know he's pressed a key and turned the display back on.

But who wouldn't want to get close to this little guy?