Charles has been a bit of a whiny-bot lately because of his frustration at not driving 24×7. Even when I let him drive he is now in the same state Corwin as when Corwin started driving. This consists of driving for about 20 seconds and then getting very unhappy about something (I have never determined what the problem is but apparently it’s common to 2 year old children driving computer simulated cars. Why has no research been done on this important topic?). My solution is to give him a different car, which mollifies him for another 20 seconds. To do this, one presses the ESCAPE key to bring up the menu to select another car. At first Charles would indicate his desire by crying and then grabbing my hand and placing it near the keyboard. Now, after only a day or so of this, Charles presses the ESCAPE key by himself to bring up the menu. He actually watches and if he bounces the key (which removes the menu) he’ll try again until the menu is up. Then, of course, he puts my hand on the mouse so that I can do the rest of the task. What’s impressive is that Charles doesn’t just bang on the keyboard, he presses the specific key required to get the menu. Perhaps I’ll have to accept only talking to Charles via an text messaging system. I could get a vocoder and use it to simulate Charles talking…