Three-year-old Iphone Expert

Last October, we finally got an Iphone, after many months of torturous longing.   The moment we got it, and took it out of the cute little box, K was instantly attracted and bidding for her own slice of time on the sexy touch screen.  So I figured hey, she can type in the phone numbers as I call them out, when working on updating contacts.   Not only was it a great opportunity to practice her number recognition skills, but also satisfied her need to play with Mommy and Daddy’s shiny new toy.

Little did we know that we had created an unrepentent monster. 

Every single day, she would negotiate for time to play with the Iphone.  Within a couple days, she had learned how to change the wallpaper photo,  turn WiFi on/off, open the calculator and shift it from simple to scientific, rearrange the app icons (look Mom, I made the buttons wiggle!), type letters/numbers in the notepad, review calendar entries, and play songs from the iPod interface.  When I say learned, I do not in any way mean random button pushing–once she figured out how to make something happen, she did not forget and could reliably repeat the behavior on request.

Silly us–we thought that was pretty amazing and cute.  We started joking about videotaping her expertise and sending it to Apple.

Within a couple weeks, she had learned how to “play” a solitaire game I downloaded, ie how to advance the cards and shift them around.  She figured out how to call people, but it was always random luck on who she dialed, so I eventually had to start discouraging her from roulette phone calls.  She learned how to open the picture catalog and skim through them.  She learned how to delete apps, change a variety of settings, and play Tiltsnake.  SHE taught ME how to quick delete emails, and also showed me the “sleep” button on top that I had somehow overlooked up to that point.

It was around that time that she started preschool and upon the enrollment visit, she was interacting with one of the graduate students in the ‘house’ role-play area of the classroom.  The student handed her a plastic toy phone and encouraged her to “make a call”.  K looked at her like she was the stupidest person ever to waste oxygen, and silently handed the plastic phone right back to her. 

A couple weeks after that, she noticed the camera app and asked me to show it to her.  I demonstrated how to take a picture ONE time, and she ran off in the other room.  Upon retrieving the phone later in the day, we discovered she had taken over 100 pictures.  Mostly of her feet but there were a few candid shots of the carpet, wall, toys, and table.  By Christmas, she had become an expert fisherman, using the Flick Fishing game (she taught several other adult family members how to play this game).  She learned about 10 different fish species names and would call out to us each time she caught one, and what type it was.  If I would ask her to give me a turn, she would nonchalantly close out her game, open my solitaire app and hand it to me without saying a word.

She is THREE. 

This weekend, Uncle M (my youngest brother) came to visit and he also has an Iphone.  He showed me a couple games he recently downloaded, and one was called Pocket God.  The point is basically to torture poor helpless islanders–see picture at top.  K got one glimpse of the screen and instantly WANTED TO SEE THE HULA PEOPLE, and 3 days later is still pretty much willing to sell off body parts to get time playing the game.  She was relatively nonplussed by my other new game  (good old Tetris–one of the few games I am actually good at!) but she played a few times and said  “Mom, I’m just stacking some blocks with my fingers”.   She vastly prefers torturing the hula people.

At this point, I figure I should just pimp her out as a full-time app reviewer.