New Keyboard

Among the things R loves to do with our laptops:

--Look at pictures. This is by far her number one request whenever she sees one of us on the computer. She loves looking at pictures of her cousins, who she does not get to see NEARLY enough, and we sometimes google pictures of different animals or things we have been talking about with her to show her.

--Watch videos. Again, sometimes these are videos of her cousins doing cute-as-all-get-out things, but other times these are YouTube videos of Elmo or Sesame Street or other things J and I think to look up. We've let her watch Weird Al Yankovic a few times.

--Play games. This one is tricky though because she really can't use our keyboards or our mouse very well, and we're pretty leery of letting her push the buttons since the last thing we want is broken laptop keyboards (I dealt with a laptop that didn't have a space bar for awhile and it was not pretty).

So when we found this little kids' keyboard on sale we got one for R. It's totally awesome. I love that the keys are so large and easy for her to identify. It's also fairly indestructible (according to the advertising and some of the reviews we found online) and the mouse is a nice size for her little hand.
This lets her play games a little bit better. Some that we've let her play over the last few months (and by "play" I really mean we've broken this keyboard out about 3 times):

FreeRealms (kind of like a cutesy fantasy online world that's totally free-- the bonus about this game is that R likes trying to move her little fairy character around with the mouse and watching the world kind of take shape around her).

Fisher Price Alphabet Game (which is fun for getting her to identify letters--and another reason why the big keys on this keyboard are great). This is the game she is playing in the pictures on this post.

and all the games on Mo Willems's website, including Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed, Elephant and Piggie Dance, and Hot Dog Dress Up. These games are cute and mostly just involve practicing clicking rather than any real educational content, but R had a kick out of them today.