My daughter was playing hospital with all their stuffed animals lined up on the bed.
She wrote up a check-in form and asked me to make a few copies, assuming we’d do it by hand.
I told her I was going to do it on the computer. So she sat next to me as I fired up the machine and laid it out in Bluebeam. Bluebeam isn’t really a desktop publishing platform, but it works well enough.
After we were happy with the layout, we printed out a draft copy.
That’s when her mind was blown.
She just entered the age of mechanical reproduction.
After a couple drafts and we were happy with the layout, we took a break to watch the first half hour of The Penguins of Madagascar and eat dinner.
After dinner, she wanted to get back to her hospital check-in forms. At the bottom of the form was a clipart illustration of kids standing on a rainbow. She wanted to color each of the forms.
So the kids and I spent the rest of the evening coloring these forms. We finished the forms but not the movie. That’s fine. It will be here tomorrow.
It’s a little strange. She’s seen me use the printer countless times for all kinds of uses for home and work. I guess it just never registered as a tool for her life until it became her own project (she’s seen me use it many times for her schoolwork). It was amusing to listen to her marvel about the magic of the printer. I can’t remember when my dad bought a dot-matrix printer. I wonder if it blew my mind.
Parenting gives you a sparkles of magic amidst a background of drudgery. This site let’s me record those moments.