EYE-PHONE!

(For Sheryl who asked what my excuse was)

While walking with Xander along the walkway to a strip mall just after dark, we passed an AT&T cell showroom. Or, rather, I walked past it - Xander was drawn to the glass display like a magnet, pressing his face and hands to the glass. I stopped and asked him if he wanted to go inside. Instead of answering me, he ran to the door and started pulling on the handle with all the might of his 29 pounds.

“Hep!” he said to me, so I went over and assisted him by pulling open the door that must have outweighed him by a good 50 pounds. He ran into the store the moment he could squeeze his body through the opening, darting with utter abandon to the nearest technology. The showroom was aglow in blues and greens with shiny button-packed objects. It was also large and open with lots of room to run. The allure to my son was obvious.

“Can I help you find something?” asked a smiling AT&T associate. He was big and bearded and seemed to radiate jolly.

“My son is only two but loves technology, and he badly wanted to come inside and see some of your tech,” I said, as I watched Xander go over to the peg display of SD memory cards and begin taking them off their pegs, piling them up and then sorting them back correctly onto their pegs.

“I see. Has he seen the new iPhone 4?” Mr. Jolly said with a smile.

“Um… no,” I replied. I’m an avid Android enthusiast (the competitor to the Apple iPhone) so iPhone is kind of a bad word in my household. I start to mention this but stopped myself, deciding that this wasn’t the forum for that discussion. “But I’m sure he’d like it.”

I called over to Xander who had moved on to organizing the AC adapters (the organizing thing comes from his mom). He was reluctant to abandon his project at first but when I pointed to a shiny glowy hand-sized object he ran over full tilt.

Mr. Jolly handed him an iPhone secured to the desk by a cable. My son held it with reverence. “This is an iPhone,” said Mr. Jolly.

“Eye-phone,” Xander said, and began poking at the touch-sensitive screen. Instantly the iPhone began responding to his touch and he started to giggle. “Try this,” said Mr. Jolly, and he pressed an icon that activated the built-in webcam. Suddenly an image of Xander and his arm holding the phone was visible. Xander smiled wide.

“Eye-phone!!!” Xander yelled in excitement. He was almost jumping up and down.

Even after we had moved on from that table, he would run from phone to phone asking “Eye-Phone?”

“No, that’s a Blackberry.”

“Eye-Phone?”

“No, that’s a Nokia.”

“Eye-Phone?”

But after all, he does have the attention span of a toddler, so we moved on. We did a game where I walked backwards and weaved between the displays of phones with him chasing after me. We then reversed roles. The large open areas with their displays also made a great area to play hide and seek. The AT&T staff were wonderfully patient with us. I was showing Xander a large touch display that flashed different things on the screen as he touched it when Michal came walking in. “THERE you two are!” she said. It was close to Xander’s bed time so it was time to go.

Xander cried as we left, reaching out his arms to the door and crying “ Eye-PHOOOONE!!!!!!”

I placed my face in my hands. I had created a monster.