Tuesday, May 5, 2009

My kid and the internet

So you probably know Brent and I are more or less addicted to the internet. It is the source of my livelihood these days as well as inspiration for my creative side. Brent has scads of things he does and reads there and will likely start blogging for Geek Dad soon, as his application has been accepted and he's drafting his first posting with his editor. (They even have a style guide! Yes, I'll let you know if/when it posts).

With this in mind, it is probably not surprising that our child has recently discovered and is proceeding to love the internet. I'll admit it wasn't intentional on our part and we do feel just a bit sheepish about it as doesn't seem like the best thing for a two year old. However, it is rainy and dreary here and hard to refuse something we enjoy. For some time, we've watched the occasional Thomas video with him or something like that with him in our laps. More recently, he had been asking to go ... and I quote to "pbskids.org" This is the megasite for all the pbs kids shows with subpages for each. This includes shows like Seasame Street, Reading Rainbow, Super Why, Sid the Science Kid, Clifford, and many more.

We humored him a bit and would play Dash's matching game with, or actually more for, him. One day he somehow got free reign with the mouse to Brent's computer and we noticed he seemed to know what to do with it all of a sudden. So, we gave him a bit more opportunity and a little instruction. This weekend Brent tried to teach him about double-clicking. He is now able to pretty much navigate around pbskids.org by himself and click on various features of the shows. Often, he hits the wrong (read "right") mouse key due to his hands being small for the mouse that may bring up some odd menus, but generally he does pretty well.

Monday, I had a late in the afternoon teleconference so he was awake before it ended. I had pbskids pulled up and he played by himself on Brent's computer while I worked with no problem for the 15 minutes it took to finish my call. I knew in theory he could do this, but had never really let him have complete control. There he was having found and then playing on Dash's matching game on his own. (Not successfully or anything crazy like that, clearly).

It is pretty spectacular. I think I was first on the internet in late high school and now my son has allotted internet time at age two. Is something that will need a lot of supervision and I don't want us to spend all day doing, but it is fascinating. Is funny when he gets impatient and starts spelling out the site to us. My favorite quote was him telling Brent. "Daddy, w w w (dot) P...." got get the picture as now, already we're the slow ones!

Another milestone, another step for our growing boy who continues to amaze and surprise us.

2 comments:

Chrissie said...

My niece loves uptoten.com. Boowa and Kwala =) It's pretty cute. She's three and can navigate all over the internet

Summer said...

Oh my gosh this is both hilarious and amazing. I love that he knows the website names! I have not tried any of those sites and need to. The only one we go to is You Tube for her to watch Barney, and if it stops before we get back in there she tries to get him to start playing again and usually ends up increasing the font size on the computer to 1000, but that's about it. It's always something that I cannot easily undo. Perhaps I should take the time to actually teach her. It's funny, sometimes I think I treat her too much like a baby still, rather than explain things I just try and gloss over and do them for her. Need to get out of that habit I suppose, thanks for pointing that out!

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