James Proclaims!

As I continue my attempt to embrace the modern world by writing this on one electronic hand-held device, Little Proclaims is asking another electronic hand-held device to break wind.

I never previously envisaged a world in which writing a sentence like the preceding one would be possible. Nonetheless, that is very much the world I find myself occupying. As I hone my blog writing skills via the medium of smartphone, my eldest child is immersing herself in the world of voice-activated features on a device that she likes to refer to as ‘her tablet’.

It is indeed a tablet computer, though her claims to ownership are more by default than anything else.

The object in question was an impulse purchase by me a couple of years back, when an already fairly ‘budget’ device was made even more affordable by a promotional event held by a well-known virtual retailer. We were, at the time, a ‘tabletless’ household and I felt we should explore the benefits of embracing the zeitgeist. It has proven to be a fairly useless purchase to three quarters of my family. Mini Proclaims is still too young to show any significant interest in screens smaller than the TV (which is a medium she is worryingly devoted to). Mrs Proclaims and I find our information technology needs are generally satisfied by our laptops and phones. Conversely, Little Proclaim has been smitten by the allure of the ten-inch screen since day one, if largely inept at using it. Indeed, any parental guilt I might have experienced about occupying my daughter with excessive table time have been quickly assuaged. I ration her use of the machine with more diligence than I might have thought plausible. This is for less noble reasons than I might like to admit though. The main benefit to me of letting my child spend time using the device would be that she doesn’t need any input from me and I can get on with other things. In reality, Little Proclaims is significantly more demanding when equipped with the tablet than she is without it. She doesn’t so much use the device as commission me to use it on her behalf. She loves the idea of technology but lacks the patience to learn how to use it.

This weekend, though, we visited our extended family, and Little Proclaims discovered the joys of the voice controlled virtual assistant through her technologically more adept cousin.

Who taught her how to make the device ’fart’.

So Little Proclaim has been instructing our cheap (and probably out of date) tablet computer to make flatulent sounds for the last hour or so. It is quite annoying, but she is seemingly capable of carrying out this endeavour independently. I have endured the recurrent raspberries by using my own device to write this post and simultaneously play music through my well-worn blue-tooth headphones (I’m not a total technophobe – wireless headphones have been my salvation on more than one occasion in recent times) to drown out the noise.

Unfortunately, by zoning out the technological (and scatological) machinations of my eldest child, I’ve inadvertently also ignored the lo-tech endeavours of my youngest child. Mini Proclaims has just come to give me an impromptu hug, which would have been entirely welcome had she not been soaking wet, having spent much of the recent interlude emptying her water bottle on herself.

I love my children. Sometimes though, it is hard to articulate why.