Little Texter

My daughter is sending text messages now.   She’s doing so in a variety of ways.   The first was her telling me what to say and me typing it for her.   After that, I let her bang away on the emoji page, letting her know afterwards what pictures she’d sent since she couldn’t see them herself.

The next step, which we’ve only really done once, is her using her Orbit to type a message in braille which is then translated to text within the message.  That’s fun, but requires the Orbit to be with us where we are and a few extra steps to get it paired, voice over on and the message chain up.  

What happened during the initial excitement with the Orbit is my daughter started a conversation with my mother.   They’re playing a “guess what I’m thinking about” game where one person describes the item and then the other person guesses.  

The questions aren’t adult-level complicated, but more like, “I’m thinking of a fruit that’s yellow that monkeys like.”   My daughter has been making up questions for Mimi as well.   They started doing some math problems after that, with my daughter asking what two bananas plus two bananas was.  My daughter has been trying to trick Mimi by asking what I think she believes are impossible problems such as, “what’s one minus one million?”  But Mimi’s hard to trick when it comes to math.

Then, earlier this week, my daughter realized I was talking into the phone to create a text message.   I explained it was voice to text—we talk and it writes out what we said in text.   She said, “oh yea, dad and Uncle Bob do that.”   And I thought suddenly it would be a very easy way for her to send a message to Mimi to continue their game.

It works easily and well and there’s no setup or hardware I need other than the phone, which is on me most of the time.  When she gets a little older I’m going to see if I can get her set up so she can text without me being involved.   We have a children’s text message app we’ve used, but it doesn’t have the voice option, but I’m sure there’s something out there we can find.

The Big Boy Update:  My son spent the morning with Snap Circuit sets he got for Christmas.  He was making all sorts of projects, covering the kitchen table.   He’s reading and following the directions, which wouldn’t have been possible at Christmas because his reading ability wasn’t even close.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Today was the first day of kindergarten.  She had a new “taxi” driver (school transportation SUV).   She was in a new class with a new teacher and a new braillest since hers retired.   A lot of changes.   She was a little unhappy about getting in the taxi this morning but didn’t cry or say she wasn’t going.   She got home unexpectedly early as some of the other students were driven by their parents on the first day—and we weren’t home.    Fortunately, Edna, who cleans our house was here.   But with all that, when I got home my daughter was excited about school and told me all about it.   She’s in such a good mood.