Bow and the Touchscreen Today

Yes, Bow does own a touchscreen. It's a computer that is dedicated to him. Nobody else uses it. But Bow does not use it much, either,  This is by his own choice. For years we tried to entice him to use his computer to type out words which would then be sounded out for him. But he didn't want to. On the other hand, whenever he sees that I am using my laptop to watch a video, Bow keeps asking me to bring the laptop in so he can see the video, too.

There are several reasons why the serious attempts to get Bow to use the touchscreen didn't work. One, we were afraid he would destroy it, so we could not leave the computer in with Bow unsupervised. Two, we tried to get him to use chopsticks to point at letters through the grid. Three, we didn't want to have Bow changing the settings on the touchscreen, so we put barriers in the form of plexiglass to keep him from touching anything but the letters we wanted him to touch. Four, with all these limitations in effect, Bow could hardly do anything with the computer. Five, Bow caught on to the idea that using the touchscreen was nothing but work, so he did not choose to do that. If he said "no" to an offer of a touchscreen session, we had to respect that. So "no" it was for a very long time.

But today Bow was bored. We have finished all the electronic editing we could do on "Our Lady of Kaifeng: Courtyard of the Happy Way" and are waiting for the first proof to arrive,  And when I asked Bow what he wanted, he told me תני לי הכל  -- "Give me everything." Well, everything, I figured, includes the touchscreen. So I asked him if he wanted to use the touchscreen. He said yes, and so I brought it in.

The touchscreen does not have a battery, so it has to be connected by  a cord to the electricity, This makes getting it into the pen Bow is in a little awkward, as there are now outlets where Bow is, for obvious safety reasons.

I propped the computer up against the glass window between the two pens for support. Bow got distracted at first by something that was going on outside. Then he turned on not one, but a couple of different video games, and the music was very loud. He proceeded to dance to the music, getting more excited as time went by.

Eventually, he got so excited that he knocked down the computer, but when I reprimanded him, he set it upright again and settled down to try to play the video games.

Unfortunately, neither Bow nor I understood the rules to the video game he was playing, so we did not score any points.  After a while, we switched off the computer.

There has got to be a way to motivate Bow to use the touchscreen more productively. Nothing is going to happen unless he wants it to happen.  He does not want to use the word sounding out program we have for him. But I think he would actually enjoy a language-based game better than whatever it was he was trying to play.

Thanksgiving: "Yes, I see [a] party!"

Lawrence was here the day before Thanksgiving, to sit with Bow while my mother and I prepared things for the feast. They could both see the kitchen, from inside the pens, and Bow likes to watch. He was feeling very talkative that day, and Lawrence reports that he even used his touchscreen. At one point, Bow poked  the computer with his chopstick until he got it to say: "Yes, I see party."

"I see party?" I repeated when Lawrence told me.

"Yeah. That's what it sounded like. I didn't actually see what he spelled."

Bow contrives to spell things on the computer when Lawrence is not looking. So, it is entirely possible that the "see" was spelled "C". But the "yes" and the "party" would be hard to achieve any other way than spelling them out. And let's face it "I" and the letter "I" are already a shortcut in normal spelling.

Now, people who claim chimps do not have syntax could make a really big deal of how there was no article in front of the word "party". I assure you, however, that Bow left that out because of difficulty with typing, and not because he doesn't know grammar. For that matter, having articles in front of nouns is not a universal of human language. Lots of language don't have them at all. Hebrew has a definite article and not an indefinite one. One might have supposed it was a question of fluency with English. But those of us who know Bow really well know his English is better than that. Using the touchscreen is hard. I sometimes leave out articles when I type, too.

As for the semantics of what he said, you kind of have to understand the context, too.We so seldom have people over, even just family, that to Bow seeing me and my mother and Sword talking, and laughing and working in the kitchen preparing a Thanksgiving feast seemed like a "party".

Thanksgiving day was just family: Sword, Bow, my mother and me. Bow and Sword each got a turkey leg, so that neither could claim I was favoring the other. The other favorite thing among the younger generation was cranberry sauce. Here are some candid shots I took with my laptop's built in camera:

Can versus Will

Yesterday afternoon, while Lawrence was watching Bow, I baked a cake. No, I didn't bake it from scratch. It was from a lemon-poppy seed muffin mix, but I baked it like a cake, and I used three eggs instead of two, because of the surplus of eggs that we have. I haven't baked anything in ages, because the oven is in the kitchen, and I need a sitter just to be able to get there.

Well, that's not completely accurate. I bake chicken and sweet potatoes practically every day, but I have that down as a routine, and I don't spend one extra minute in the kitchen. I just stick them in the oven as fast as I can. Cakes, though, even when they come in a mix, require a little more time.

Bow can see the kitchen from the pens. That's one of the nice things about the house layout. The pens open up into the living room, so Bow can see anything that goes on in the living room with no extra effort. In order to see the kitchen, he has to stand in a certain spot and peer at an angle.

I could see Bow and Lawrence standing there, watching me as I prepared the mix. Then, when the cake was in the oven, I called Sword to the kitchen so she could lick the bowl. I glanced in the direction of the pens. Bow was standing on his tippy-toes watching all this intently.

Sword is not a very efficient bowl licker, so there was plenty left when she was done. I brought the bowl into the entry way of the pens. "Would you like to lick the bowl, Bow?" I asked. "Tell Lawrence on the computer."

We are still trying to coax Bow to use the touchscreen computer rather than the letters on the glass. We do not use food as a reward. But licking the bowl isn't really about food. It's almost like a recreational activity.

Bow didn't answer me, so I left the bowl there and went to check my email. When I was gone, Bow took Lawrence to the glass and spelled: "I want to lick the bowl."

"Can you say that on the computer?" Lawrence asked.

"Yes," Bow spelled. Then he went over to the computer, but didn't spell anything. After that, he took Lawrence back to the letters on the glass.

"Okay, Bow, I know you can spell it on the computer," Lawrence said. "But will you spell it on the computer?"

Bow spelled: "No."

"Why not?"

"It's hard."

Where did the chopstick go?

When I turned on the older touchscreen yesterday, the calibration seemed to have fixed itself by some mysterious means. You could touch the letters in the center of each colored square, and it would register. So I left the chopstick in Bow's possession and went to work on the computer in the adjoining pen. I hadn't looked away for more than five minutes, and the next time I looked, there was no chopstick. I went back in with Bow and, after searching visually throughout the pen, I asked him: "Where's the chopstick?"

" ש-ם" he spelled. That means "there".


"Where?" I asked. He gestured vaguely at one of the doors to the pen. I went all around the outer perimeter of Bow's pen, to see if he had placed the chopstick outside the pen by passing it through the openings in the grid. There was no chopstick.

For a short while, I actually believed he had swallowed it. But when a whole day passed and it did not appear in his stool, I came to the conclusion that this theory was unlikely to be correct.

This morning, when I turned on the computer, Bow gesticulated toward it, as if asking to use it. "But where's the chopstick?" I asked.

"Mommy remembers so much," he spelled.

"What did you do with it, Bow? Did you eat it?"

"No."

"Well, then where is the chopstick?"

He spelled: "It fell in the hole."

At this point I tend to believe him. He must have dropped it down the drain at the center of the pen.

Broken Chopsticks

This was Megan's third day. All is still calm and nearly idyllic, but Bow has drawn an invisible line in the sand -- or rather the concrete. He won't spell. He won't ask for things that he obviously wants. And he's been breaking chopsticks.

The first chopstick he broke today was on my watch. I took over for lunch, and as I was out in the kitchen getting lunch, the chopstick having been inadvertently left in the pen alone with Bow, he broke it. This got him in trouble, and he did not get as big a lunch as he might otherwise have had. But I saw this as an opportunity, so I told Megan about the chopstick incident, gave her a brand new chopstick for Bow to use with his touchscreen, and suggested that I would bring a snack for Bow to select around 3:30pm. 

Bow hasn't been using his touchscreen computer much, and in a way, it's hard to blame him. It's not easy work spelling out words on that screen. We need help programming a more user friendly text-to-speech program for him, and with that end in mind, I posted an ad for a programmer today.

Anyway, at 3:30 on the dot I brought out three possible snacks: grapes on plate, a red apple and a small glass of pomegranate juice. I put them outside the glass door and spoke out their names for Bow and Megan to see and hear. Then Bow was to select one. Only he refused to spell anything, on the glass or on the computer. I left the snacks out throughout the day, but he never did ask for one. When I came to relieve Megan at 5:00 pm, the three snacks were still there, untouched.

It still didn't seem so bad, as Bow was gracious and gentle with Megan all day, cuddling with her and using the potty properly. No accidents. But just when I thought he had been perfect, I saw the broken chopstick --cleanly broken in two, no shards -- on the side of the glass away from Bow.

"Did he break another chopstick?" Sword asked at dinner.

"Yes, but I don't know how it happened. Did you break it when Megan didn't see?" I asked Bow.

"No," he spelled. "She just didn't tell you."