Our son is iPhone native

I’ve always been led to think that babies start say­ing their first word out of the blue, and start walk­ing unaided all of a sudden.

Kai can walk now, albeit with his arms in the air hold­ing on to invis­i­ble para­chute straps. But that has taken about a fort­night of tak­ing one, then two unaided steps, and there hasn’t really been a defin­ing moment announc­ing his biped­ness.

The other amaz­ing thing is how quickly he’s taken to using the other things always attached to us besides him — my Black­berry and Naomi’s iPhone.

Naomi and I started out think­ing: “We’re not going to let our son be dis­tracted by flashy light thin­gies, PSPs and other such like”, but it was always going to be a lost cause when you have to feed, change and gen­er­ally have to attend to a squirmy one year old toddler.

Other par­ents who don’t already know this — these are the two life-saving apps for your Black­berry and iPhone: Baby GO! for the ‘Berry, and Talk­ing Carl for the iPhone.

Then Sun­day night, we went out to Ion Orchard, and as expected, Kai got antsy after half an hour in the restau­rant, so I took him out to tod­dle around the 4th floor. Near the concierge’s counter was a pil­lar with two touch-screen direc­to­ries. One of them was just right for his height (pre­sum­ably for the wheel­chair bound), so he went at it, press­ing and push­ing until he acci­den­tally pressed the search but­ton at the bot­tom right, acti­vat­ing an onscreen keyboard.

Our 14 month-old knows his key­board and starts press­ing the let­ters any­howly. But here’s the clincher: He’s been mim­ic­k­ing how Naomi, her mum and myself make and take calls with our phones over the past three months or so, and it still make us chuckle when he puts his hand to his ear every time he hears someone’s phone ring­ing. So this time, after press­ing a series of let­ters on the touch-screen key­board, he puts his hand to his ear and says his ver­sion of “hello?”