Clara’s musical interests have shifted to Aretha Franklin — and now it’s “Respect” that she wants to hear, over and over again. “I want respect!” she says. Most of the time I’m able to bite my tongue, but once I couldn’t help myself: “Respect has to be earned, Clara.” Actually, I’m glad she’s demanding respect. And “Respect.”
Clara heard “Walk This Way” on the radio last week, and asked to hear it again yesterday. Karen says they listened to it about 18 times yesterday morning (including both Aerosmith and Run DMC versions) before preschool. After she got home, all Clara wanted to do was sit in front of the computer and listen to it over and over again. “I want Arrowsmiss” she said. She must have spent an hour listening to the song. “He said ‘flying up in the air’,” my little rocker girl observed after awhile. God help us when she asks what “down on the muffin” means.
Yesterday Clara and I went to the park. I was unshaven (almost no time for personal hygiene in our nonstop weekend schedule), unshowered (ditto), baseball cap pulled down over my messy hair, clothes slightly splattered with food from one of Clara’s meals earlier in the day, shoes still stained with mud from a visit to the pumpkin farm last month. And then, in the bathroom, C. wiped her wet hands on my pants, so I got to emerge from the bathroom with a big wet spot right on my crotch. My humiliation is complete–I am now totally uncool. If the teenaged Clara ever asks me, a few years from now, when I became such a dork, I will point to this day.
By popular demand: Clara’s “bad face” costume for Halloween. Here she is with Mara, the purple princess.
I took home a Gateway Tablet PC this weekend to test it out. With its built-in WiFi connection, the tablet makes a pretty decent Web-browsing and reading machine: I could stretch out on the couch, for instance, and read the latest WSJ while holding the tablet on my lap at any comfortable angle. Or on the front porch. Nice.
But the real killer app for the Tablet PC, as far as my daughter is concerned, is Sesame Street. Age two and a half, Clara is already very familiar with this Web site and its many, Flash-based interactive games. (I’ve had “Chicken Dance Elmo” drilled into my brain from seemingly infinite repetition — and don’t even get me started on the SoCal surrealism of “Make-A-Monster.”) With an ordinary computer, she needs to sit at a desk with a grownup who can work the mouse for her, since she doesn’t yet understand the mouse-cursor connection — a fairly complicated piece of hand-eye coordination.
With a tablet, though, she can click on things herself, just by tapping on the screen with the stylus. She mastered this in short order. Many of the games on the Sesame Street site ask her to click on various things, and there are immediate results when she does — things make noise, the monsters respond by talking, colors change, etc. What’s more, we could sit on the couch instead of at a desk. This is a plus since she frequently wants to hop down onto the floor to dance along with the music from the site.
The only potential disaster happened when she grabbed a bottle of cleaning fluid her grandfather was using and started to spray it onto the screen. Yikes! We stopped her in time, fortunately.
The Gateway tablet is a test unit from the Mobile PC labs. Would I pay $2300 for one of my own? No way. But bring the price down, and make it a bit more durable, and you’ve got a pretty good toddler computer.
