Dash Wants to Reformat Your Harddrive

Four-and-a-half year old Dash still isn’t reading. Yesterday, he drew the letter “A” all over his legs, feet, and belly (making tattoos!), but when I asked him to tell me what letter he wrote, he told me, “Um, I can’t remember.” He can sing the Alphabet Song, but can’t tell you how to spell his name. If you ask him, he’ll say, “H? S?” I’m trying to to be frustrated by this because he’s remarkably wonderful at other things, such as manipulating our computer.

Just this morning, he managed to start up my laptop (lugging it from my bedroom onto the dining table), open movie applications, and find movies to watch all while I was taking a shower. He’s also been sending emails and SMS (all gibberish, with lots of EMOJI), recording voice memos on my iPhone, and has tried to download updates to my applications. We usually catch him with the “Settings” dialog open, furiously trying to re-engage the dilithium-crystal array.

I caught two unsent emails hanging out in the Outbox on my iPhone recently, obviously his doing: one was a garbled attempt to reply to an email that landed in my spam folder (rightfully spam, as it was a type of Nigerian 419 money scam); the other was more curious. Addressed to “bnng@gsc_remborkeg” (can you believe that he knew to put an @ sign in the recipient field?!?), no subject, there was only an attachment, a voice memo that he had recorded.

I’m posting the voice memo below. I think he wanted to share it with you.

[Voice memo coming soon, having some technical difficulties. Dash probably would have got it through by now.]