Mrs. Ruth Faniglia

210 Lester Street

Rochester, N.Y. 14623

Dear Mrs. Faniglia,

We were very sorry to receive your letter of 23 Feb., which accompanied the i can speak!™ you returned, much to our disappointment. We here at KidLuv believe that the i can speak!™ is an innovative and essential educational tool that, used with proper parental guidance, offers a rare early-development opportunity for babies and toddlers alike. And so I thought I would take some of my personal time (I am on lunch) and try to address the questions you raised in your letter, which is here in front of me on my (cluttered!) desk.

First, may I be so bold as to suggest that your disappointment may stem from your own, perhaps unreasonable, expectations? Because in your letter, what you indicated, when I read it, was that you think and/or thought that somehow the product can read your baby’s mind? Our product cannot read your baby’s mind, Mrs. Faniglia. No one can read a baby’s mind, at least not yet. Although believe me, we are probably working on it! All the i can speak!™ can do, however, is respond to aural patterns in a way that makes baby seem older. Say baby sees a peach. If you or Mr. Faniglia (I hope I do not presume) were to loudly say something like “What a delicious peach!” the i can speak!™, hearing this, through that little slotted hole near the neck, would respond by saying something like “i like peach.” Or “i want peach.” Or, if you had chosen the ICS2000 (you chose the ICS1900, which is fine, perfectly good for most babies), the i can speak!™ might even respond by saying something like “fruit, isn’t that one of the major food groups?” Which would be pretty good, for a six-month-old like Derek, your son, don’t you think?

But here I must reiterate: That would not in reality be Derek speaking. Derek would not in reality know that a peach is fruit, or that fruit is a major food group. The i can speak!™ knows, however, and, from its position on Derek’s face, it will give the illusion that Derek knows, by giving the illusion that Derek is speaking out of the twin moving SimuLips. But that is it. That is all we claim.

Furthermore, in your letter, Mrs. Faniglia, you state that the i can speak!™ “mask” (your terminology) takes on a “stressed-out look when talking that is not what a real baby’s talking face appears like but is more like some nervous middle-aged woman.” Well, maybe that is so, but, with all due respect, you try it! You try making a latex face look and talk and move like the real face of an actual live baby! Inside are over 5000 separate circuits and 390 moving parts. And as far as looking like a middle-aged woman, we beg to differ: we do not feel that a middle-aged stressed-out woman has (1) no hair on head and (2) chubby cheeks and (3) fine downy facial hair. The ICS1900 unit is definitely the face of a baby, Mrs. Faniglia. We took over twenty-five hundred photos of different babies and using a computer combined them to make this face, this face we call Male Composite 37 or, affectionately, Little Roger. But what you possibly seem to be unhappy about is that Little Roger’s face is not Derek’s face? To be frank, Mrs. Faniglia, many of you, our customers, have found it disconcerting that their baby looks different with the i can speak!™ on. Which we find so surprising. Did you, we often wonder, not look at the cover of the box? On that cover the ICS1900 is very plainly shown, situated on a sort of rack, looking face-wise like Little Roger, albeit Little Roger is a bit crumpled and has a forehead furrow of sorts.

But this is why we came up with the ICS2100. With the ICS2100, your baby looks just like your baby. And, because we do not want anyone to be unhappy with us, we would like to give you a complimentary ICS2100 upgrade! We would like to come to your house on Lester Street and make a personalized plaster cast of Derek’s real, actual face! And soon, via FedEx, here will come Derek’s face in a box, and when you slip that ICS2100 over Derek’s head and Velcro the Velcro, he will look so very much like himself! Plus we have another free surprise, which is that, while at your house, we will tape his actual voice and use it to make our phrases, the phrases Derek will subsequently say. So not only will he look like himself, he will sound like himself, as he crawls around your house appearing to speak!

Plus we will throw in several other personalizing options. Say you call Derek “Lovemeister.” (I am using this example from my own personal home, as my wife, Ann, and I call our son Billy “Lovemeister,” because he is so sweet.) With the ICS2100, you might choose to have Derek say, upon crawling into a room, “here comes the lovemeister!” or “stop talking dirty, the lovemeister has arrived!” How we do this is, laser beams coming out of the earlobes, which sense the doorframe. So the i can speak!™ knows it has just entered a room, from its position on Derek’s head! And also you will have over one hundred Discretionary Phrases to more highly personalize Derek. For instance, you might choose to have him say, on his birthday, “mommy and daddy, remember that time you conceived me in aruba?” Although probably you did not in fact conceive Derek in Aruba. That we do not know. (Our research is not that extensive!) Or say your dog comes up and gives Derek a lick? You could make Derek say (if your dog’s name is Queenie), “queenie, give it a rest!” Which, you know what? It makes you love him more. Because suddenly he is articulate. Suddenly he is not just sitting there going glub glub glub while examining a piece of his own feces on his own thumb, which is something we recently found Billy doing! Sometimes we have felt that our childless friends think badly of us for having a kid who just goes glub glub glub in the corner while looking at his feces on his thumb. But now when childless friends are over, what we have found, my wife, Ann, and I, is that it’s great to have your kid say something witty and self-possessed years before he or she would actually in reality be able to say something witty or self-possessed. The bottom line is that it’s just fun when you and your childless friends are playing cards, and your baby suddenly blurts out (in his very own probable future voice), “it is likely that we still don’t fully understand the import of all of einstein’s findings!”

Here I must admit that we have several times seen a sort of softening in the eyes of our resolute childless friends, as if they, too, would suddenly like to have a baby.

And as far as Derek flinching whenever that voice issues forth from him? When that speaker near his mouth sort of buzzes his lips? May I say this is not unusual? What I suggest? Try putting the ICS on Derek for a short time at first, maybe ten minutes a day, then gradually building up his Wearing Time. That is what we did. And it worked super. Now Billy wears his even while sleeping. In fact, if we forget to put it back on after his bath, he pitches a fit. Kind of begs for it! He starts to say, you know, “Mak! Mak!” Which we think is his word for mask. And when we put the mask on and Velcro the Velcro, he says, or rather it says, “guten morgen, papa!” because we are trying to teach him German, and have installed the German Learning module in our ICS2100. Or for example, if his pants are not yet on, he’ll say, “how about slapping on my rompers so i can get on with my day!” (I wrote that one. )