You really can’t blame O for what happened. The past few weeks I’ve been letting him play on my husband’s laptop, where he discovered the joys of the Teletubbies site. You see, he would watch his big sister N as she expertly lead Stephanie to defeat Robbie Rotten in the Lazytown (Nick Jr) site, or dressed Ken in the funkiest outfits at Barbie’s online home.

He would sit next to her quietly on our large office swivel chair, seemingly more interested than he was with his usual Elmo or Blues Clues morning shows. So I thought, why not let him try it himself?

Well, between the Thomas and Friends, Teletubbies and Sesame Street sites, he was hooked, toddling each morning after breakfast to the laptop, saying: “Mommy, games!”

Not so good for my home work schedule, but I thought it was harmless in itself until last night. I was answering emails, and he was on my bed, watching Barney Goes To School as his sister was in the bath. N shouted out for me, so I quickly went to her, leaving O alone, with the laptop open on the desk.

When I got back to the room, two minutes later, I saw, to my horror, that more than half of the laptop keys were GONE. Plucked off. And there was O looking quite pleased with himself, with the missing keys piled neatly on the desk.

Just recently we had spent an obscene amount of money getting a new LCD screen for this Mac laptop, so you can imagine my reaction when I saw what he’d done. Not a proud I’m-a-Mom-in-control moment, but more like a hysterical i’m-a-horrible-mom thing. So there were obviously a lot of tears (no violence though, I assure you), of which I felt terribly guilty about later.

Luckily, the kind man at our local computer shop was able to put all but one key back on, but I can confirm that for now, at least, O’s online exploits are on hold. At least until the terrible twos are over.