Lesson from my Daughter

"Oww ani mama dhi,"she says frustrated that her mother is a very bad learner. People might think I'm fibbing when I say this that I've learnt a lot of new things about computer usage from my six years old daughter.But its the truth and nothing but the truth.

My daughter has been fiddling with laptop since she turned three. Most of us, the parents, we don't allow our kids to touch costly appliances in the house, out of fear that they will break it. Cost of the appliances is more realistic and prominent than the knowledge our kids could get from fiddling with it. But me and my husband have always put everything aside for the happiness of our kids. So when she started fiddling with the only laptop we owned back then when she was barely three, we allowed her to, although it would pull our money-minded heart sometimes for she was not 'stay on one page kid'. She would ask the password and before she started going to school to learn her alphabets she started typing password and opening our laptop to play games on it.

I've never been keen on any electronic devices, it could be attributed to the fact that we never had any fancy electronics during our childhood days or maybe the only much used electronic device was the home-made water-heater that killed people in my town. So the fear of electrocution has always kept me away from electronics.

But my daughter has a different eye, she is too much into such devices, be it cell phones, video games or computer; she has mastered it before me. Two years ago she taught me how to insert our picture from MY DOCUMENTS and put it in the WORD page and then type after it. She didn't have words to type but she would type in her own jumble of words in that page. That was the first lesson I received from her. After that came so many features in online games.

Recently she has taught me so many things in skype. But what she taught me today has left me totally baffled. We were skyping and as usual she wanted to start the chat as well. She always writes my name instead of calling me 'mama' when we chat. But she made a slight error while typing my name, well, that happens with everybody, even with us the grown ups. I mean I re-read my posts and I always find some typing errors on it, so I haven't given much importance to it. But she says,"oh! a mistake!" and she does something and I see that she has correctly typed my name but the previous mis-spelt name is no longer on the page. Mystified I ask her how she did it.

"Oww, ani mama dhi," She laughs. She always says this line when she actually wants to say,"you are so stupid"(well, I'm her mama, how can she call me stupid). So then she instructs me, "type a word", I give her my solemn look and prepare to type a word I have in mind. Before my fingers reach the key board she warns me, don't write the correct spelling. I write a word just randomly and click on the enter. "OK, now this word is not correctly spelt, so now press on the shift button, then enter button, then click on the upward arrow," my little teacher instructs me. Whoa, she is too fast for me, I do it but the out come is I land up entering the correctly spelt word while my previous mis-spelt word is still there too.

Ten minutes later,I'm still trying to do it but it doesn't work while she does it and it works. She is agitated with the fact that I can't pick up what she, a six years old discovered on her own. I plead,"Baby, please click on the share button and show me how to do it." She scolds me,"This grandpa's desktop is too old and the share button is shaky, it's not working."

She gets an idea.She calls her eight year old cousin and makes her hold the web-cam so that I can see how she is doing it. Its another ten minutes. Her cousin complain of strain in her hands but my stupid brain still can't get it right.

"Oww ani mama dhi," she repeats exasperated. Finally after another volley of instructions later, I master that. She claps and says," Good, now don't forget that!"

(Can you guys believe it? This is no fiction, this happened this morning, really, truly. I'm writing this cos' I'm proud of her mastery. Nobody can stop a proud mother from flaunting about her daughter's skill, I guess).