Most appropriate use of this icon ever Or, Alphabet salad

[oloriel]

"No, I don't want to teach Felix to write before he reaches school age," I've always said. "I mean, if he teaches himself, that's fine, but I won't make any efforts - otherwise, elementary school will bore him to tears."
(Been there, done that.)

Now, Felix has been fascinated by letters and numbers for a while. He loves to "do the crossword" (i.e., take a pen and black out all the blank fields in the newspaper crosswords, sudokus and what-have-you). He insists that I write "FELIX" on each of his paintings. He likes to hijack my laptop, start Open Office and type what's called Buchstabensalat ("alphabet salad") in German. He also quickly found out how to play with font sizes and colours, how to change fonts, how to use capslock, how to bold and underline text or put it in italics, how to play with backgrounds, how to insert symbols and graphics, and how to create tables. In short, his computer skills are already beyond those of his grandmothers, though that's mostly because he isn't afraid of experimenting (seriously! Both my mom and mom-in-law firmly believe that computers are so volatile that clicking one "wrong" thing will forever shut the machine down, which means they call for help as soon as the computer asks to do a Flash or Java update, i.e., pretty much daily.). And it's only been a game for him so far.

(Yes, I let him use my computer. Initially, I was against it, but of course he sees me and Jörg use our computers so there's that natural "it's what grown-ups do" attraction. And he only ever uses Open Office and closes every other window that pops up. (By now. Originally, he dragged a few files into the Waste Basket and randomly started Firefox or iTunes, but he has since learned to limit his computering to alphabet salad.)

And I've tried to treat it as a game, but of course other people had to turn it into a learning game by saying things like "Ooooh, you wrote an 'A'" [or other letter]. As the brains of a two-and-a-half-years old are still blessedly hungry for knowledge and not yet stuffed with More Important Things, he immediately latched on to such information. So he now knows the names of several (capital) letters. "Ooooh, can you write FELIX/OMA/OPA?" Of course he wouldn't rest until he knew how to write those words!

Now I thought that would be it, for a while.
Then yesterday, I came in from the kitchen with supper and saw this:


"Huh, that's odd," I thought. "Why does it say 'Extras' and ---"

And then I realised why. Because Felix had apparently taken the task bar as a primer and wrote all the words from it into the document. And then he realised he'd forgotten one and added that, too. (And then he returned to his normal alphabet salad as if nothing had happened.)
Now this is scaring me more than a little. I mean, being able to type a few words like his own name, or knowing the names of a few letters, that's one thing. But being able to reliably copy pretty much any word, with no emotional attachment or without knowing what it means? And then, so far he's always used all-caps for the words he knew (like FELIX or MAMA). That's simple enough, because all the keys on the keyboard are marked with capital letters, right? But he also managed to find the lower-key forms! I don't care whether he extrapolated them from the caps, or whether he found them by trial and error, either way is an accomplishment. And not one that a healthy two-and-a-half-years old should necessarily have. :/

I guess it's a good thing that everything that requires money, also requires a password. :P