Here's one involving Legos, (and there's a dilemma in it for me) : Since the age of two I've gotten her small legos kits to assemble. By the time she was three she was assembling kits "designed for 8-12 year olds" and sometimes 14 year olds. Not being able to read very well, the age brackets went unnoticed. Now that she just turned 6 and can read, she sees that the kits I get her are for 10-14, or older. She's got this incredible sense of right/wrong and so she hands the kits back to me without even trying. She tells me she's too young for a particular kit. The ones for 6 year olds (if we can find one she didn't do when she was 2 or 3) are not even challenging. I wish they didn't put "6-12" or "8-12" so boldly on the boxes.

Mmph. So from experience, I'll mention that you might want to watch out for gendered signage on public or school bathrooms, as well!

On Legos: perhaps you could remove them from the boxes first? Though, of course, the bigger conversation is over age guidelines as ballparks or averages only, not rules set in stone. Like sizes on clothing. If she were a really tall six-year-old, would she refuse to wear size 8 clothes because she was "too young"? If she's on the smaller side, is she "too old" to wear size 4T? Obviously not. If those are the sizes that fit her body, she should wear them; we don't need to be bound by the size expectations for her age. Likewise, these Legos are the "sizes" that fit her Lego skills. (Not that there's anything wrong with playing with "younger" Legos.)

Oh, we've been going through the gender thing with bathrooms for a while now. I've been having to wait outside for a couple of years now.

Thanks for the ideas re-legos. Sometimes she goes over board with rules in general. We were at the swimming pool recently and at one point she refused to go to a certain area with me because she's not allowed to go to that area during camp (she went to a YMCA camp during the summer). She was reprimanded by a teacher because she yelled at a volunteer car driver not to text and drive. ( I told her I was proud of that one)

I know HG kids have a sense of justice (and she does, believe me) but do they sometimes also go over board with rules?

Overboard? They sure do!

Once, one of mine was at school when my spouse happened to go in to take care of something. When the class went past the office while passing from one period to another, my spouse waved, but didn't get a response. That night at dinner, SO asks DC, "I saw you at school today and said 'hi', why didn't you wave to me?" To which the answer was that the class had been instructed to be quiet and keep their hands to themselves, "but I looked at you!" Which apparently was the closest one could get to greeting one's own parent without breaking a rule, at least in DC's mind.

Wow. That's my daughter!

As an adult, I just associate this kind of stuff with the famous "Soup Nazi" episode on Seinfeld.

Has your child grown up and out of that stage? Is it a stage?

Turned out it wasn't a stage for me. So I'm being real cautious with establishing rules for DD. When she got the first couple she would go into this cute 'rules mode' where she waves her hands back and forth and recites all of the rules she knows. (No biting people or animals. etc.)

Let's just say that our child has learned that there are more grey areas in life, but would prefer that there weren't. So we haven't exactly outgrown the rules-orientation, but have picked up a bit more flexibility. I don't know that I would consider it a stage so much as a kind of asynchrony (cognitively high understanding of rules, but developmentally age-typical social skill set), combined with a certain temperament (anxious and people-pleasing, in our case).

Another child had exactly the same cognitive understanding of rules at the same ages, but responded differently to them. That's the DC who, at 18 months, was told to eat only in the kitchen, and immediately responded by deliberately standing in the kitchen, right at the edge of the tile floor, and leaning over the living room (hardwood) floor, eating. All while looking me right in the eye. Still following the rules, right?

DD13 spends all her free time drawing and writing. Several months ago she was creating a language (present, past, future tense, etc) which she used to write her math notes. My husband just left her room and rolled his eyes because she is currently using an alien language she found somewhere online to "translate" her Chinese language homework.

Her other passion is writing a comic strip where language is used to differentiate social levels just as, DD says, language was used during the apartheid era in Africa to separate White and Black Africans.

LOL. I -love- this!

So I've always told my kids that "plants" (in the gardening sense) are the ones we choose to have in our garden, and weeds are the ones we don't. It's totally arbitrary (which it is). Except I am not a particularly assiduous weeder of my planting beds. Which I think is why their idea of which species are weeds is very unlikely to line up with that of any habitue of a garden center!

DS11 loves creating stories. At school they have daily writing time. He created a series that had all the kids in his class passing around his journal each day to see what would happen next.

After a while, he got bored with writing those characters though. Some kids were doing fanfics with his characters so he offered to sell temporary rights to the series to the classmate with the best fanfics. He’d maintain ownership but would allow this other kid to continue the official series while he explored other projects. They have a classroom currency so they were able to work out a deal. He took some time off from that series but lately has been helping out the new author because “We are losing readers. He needs more conflict. It’s boring for the characters to just win win win with no problems to overcome.”
So I thought that was cool and I was impressed with his deal making.

Also, he is doing this game with another friend that is basically a D&D style choose your own adventure. His friend is the character and makes decisions based on the scenarios DS creates and DS weaves it all into a very elaborate story. Where the series he wrote in class is like a Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Captain Underpants style story, this one with his friend is a post apocalypse epic. The boys are both in the gifted program and get bussed to a school on the other side of our district so they spend about 2 hours on the bus each day playing this game. DS was thinking through scenarios last night and it was fascinating to hear how his mind works. It is really good story that’s all in DS’s head right now.
He says he might write it out at some point but isn’t ready to do that yet.