"What a lovely idea! Of course that's okay, and you can use my computer." Evelyn will just have to find a different way to watch soap operas without bothering Annie with the music. "I didn't realize you knew how to type?" 

"The keys are generally labeled, right?"

"Mine are! I know my son Jeremy has a friend who has a blank keyboard because he likes to switch between weird keyboard layouts, but I absolutely couldn't cope. I more meant that usually typing is very slow unless you've had a lot of practice and can touch-type?" It is possible that Evelyn knows this from personal experience. 

"Well, so is hand-writing, with tiny hands, and writing an entire novella will be a fair amount of practice."

"A novella!" Evelyn is pretty impressed that Annie even knows that word, though...not surprised, exactly, and on further thought it might well have come up when she was spending with Miss Enderbridge. "And fair enough! Let me know if you'd like to do some typing games to practice touch-typing. I was terrible at typing until Jeremy ended up doing one of those in school and then saw me hunting and pecking at keys and made me do it too." 

"They don't have any music?"

"I don't remember the one I did having music? ...I might've been playing it on mute, I was looking after a baby at the time and practiced when he was napping. Though either way I guess that means having it on mute doesn't make it not work. It was mainly, hmm," she tries to dredge up the memory, "- it would put a sentence up on the screen, and boxes for each letter underneath every word and you had to type the letters, and it would flash red if you typed the wrong one and grey out the next one until you backspaced and fixed it? Maybe it also beeped but I would've had the beep muted." 

"That sounds like it would work fine."

"Want me to set it up for you now?" Oh dear god hopefully she remembers where to find it on her computer. "It'll be a little while before it's time to get ready for bed." 

"Sure, thank you."

Typing game! Evelyn manages to find it within a couple of minutes, and then makes very sure the computer speakers are muted.

The game does indeed involve sentences appearing in large print on the screen, and Annie needs to type the words out. (The early levels are not timed.) The whole window flashes if she gets one wrong, which she might or might not be able to see? 

She can detect the presence or absence of letters! Typety typety. Her focus on this is very un-three-year-old-like.

Well, she's very un-three-year-old-like in a lot of ways, she's already demonstrated that, and being able to focus intently on a task is just going to benefit her in life. Evelyn does not comment on it, and finishes cleaning up after dinner. 

45 minutes later when the clock hits 7 pm, she'll start nudging Annie bedtimeward. "How was it?" 

"My hands are too small but I think it will still be faster than writing it longhand."

"They might make kid-size keyboards! I can Google it once you'e in bed, if you want?"

Probably it's expensive, but this seems like it really should be the sort of thing where she could ask Social Services to pay for it as a reasonable accommodation for her foster child with disabilities. Not that having three-year-old-sized hands is precisely a disability, but a usable keyboard is definitely something Annie would benefit from more because her other disabilities mean she can't easily leave the house. 

"Sounds good to me."

Time for Annie's cold bath and bed-going.

Evelyn spends a while on Google trying to find child-size keyboards, and possibly she's just bad at Google - that would probably be Jeremy's diagnosis - but she's ending up a) child-sized piano keyboards, or b) computer keyboards with larger keys and easy-to-read print, which....is not solving the problem Annie has. 

She writes up log notes. She bolds the section where Annie is learning to type - which seems like important enrichment for her, given how limited her childhood is likely to be in other ways - and asked about a smaller keyboard to fit her hands. Maybe the social worker knows, though Evelyn is not exactly hopeful. 

In the morning after breakfast, Annie can use the computer some more if she wants! "Sorry, I didn't find anything about smaller keyboards. I can ask my son Jeremy to look around? He's much better at finding obscure things on Google. And I'm sure he'd love to meet you at some point." 

"Sure. He's moved out?"

"Yep! He's going to be finishing up his first year of college soon, he moved out last fall. He stayed in town, though, so he visits a lot. I'll send him a text and ask if he'd like to come by for dinner, if that sounds good to you? - he definitely won't sing." 

"That's fine. What's he majoring in?"

"Anthropology. Sorry, don't ask me what that means, I'm not sure. Anyway, he hasn't really decided what career he's aiming for, so he might change his major at some point." 

"Anthropology is the study of various human cultures."

"Neat! I'm not sure if he'd tried to explain it to me and I just missed it, but - it would suit him. He likes people, and - he likes being able to understand people who aren't like him."

Chuckle. "Maybe it comes of growing up with a mom who kept fostering all sorts of kids who weren't like him." 

(Evelyn would definitely not say this to all - or most - of her foster kids, but - her gut is telling her that it might help, with Annie, and that it probably won't make anything worse.)

"You've been doing this that long? Did he like it when he was a kid?"

"...Yeah, I've been fostering other kids since he was a baby. - Not kids the same age as him, that's not recommended, but - eight to twelve years olds when he was tiny, and teenagers when he was in primary school, and then eventually it flipped and I was fostering little kids when he was in high school. I don't know if he liked every minute of it - probably not, a lot of it wasn't exactly fun - but I made sure to ask him, every time, if he wanted to have another kid come live here. And - I think it was only twice that he said no, he needed a break. And both times, he came back less than a week later and told me he'd had enough of a break and asked me when we'd have another foster placement."