Sad mouseless lad
Adam: [frost]
Apple shop owner: I said ‘hello’. Look, I have a present for you!
Adam: HELLO! [accepts Apple-branded mousepad]
A few minutes later…
Adam: Papa, now I need a MOUSE.
…
And a COMPUTER.
…
And I think I am ready for a KEYBOLD.
Still a bit baffled by his liquid phonemes, ‘owly’ is how Adam still pronounces ‘early’; so his oft-requested Thomas the Tank Engine video, “Thomas: The Early Years” comes out “Owly Yewills’. Laffs.
[NB: Sofia has two authorized Apple shops. Neither one is readily Googleable even if you know they exist. Enter a string like apple mac computer sales service sofia bulgaria and you will not turn up links to either iStyle, the trendy boutique at Rakovski and Graf Ignatief in the heart of the center, nor Creative Center, the far more utilitarian and service-oriented place (excellent service, I might add -- these guys replaced my logic board competently, quickly, and for free) on Ul. Svetoslav Terter. Why these guys, of all places, are not search engine optimized I do not know, but maybe they'll be slightly more Googleable now via this addendum.]
Love, love, love this! Perhaps you should forward to Mr. Jobs…he could create the iKid or something. A cross between a Speak-n-Spell and Atari.
Days later, I wonder: Does he even know what a mouse is? Maybe he thinks it is a pad for a real mouse. But yes, I see his other comments are relevant. Sigh.
Yeah, you worked it out. He for sure knows about mouses (I am told from the highest echelons of linguistic correctness that when a word is reformulated its regularity w/r/t inflection etc. does not necessarily come along for the ride). The kid watches his parents fooling with these things all the time wand wants to do likewise, so he’s already at the stage of building, say, a computer out of Legos. (And ask me about the time he got hold of one of my students’ papers and ‘graded’ it.)
Weird thing will be that Alek is actually getting a little Speak & Spell-y ‘computer’ for Christmas, and Adam is sure to be envious as hell. Then again, Adam is getting an actual kid’s camera, so he won’t have to rely on the flaky juice-box-and-toilet-paper-tube rigs he’s used to using. They just cannot autofocus in low light.