Agreed! I think those are pretty unusual stories, even among HG+ kids. He sounds like a deep thinker and a pattern-y guy. I have one of those, too, so I adore those kinds of stories even more than most!

Please, share often!

I think they were all looking at the Meta-Four!

Love it!! When DS was about that age -- 3 or maybe 4 -- I babysat a friend of his two afternoons a week, and we would always bring a big bag of stuff to keep ourselves entertained while she took a nap. Generally we made a mess of their living room in various ways, and we always cleaned it up before the mom came home....

But one time we got completely carried away with little scraps of paper... He would come up with a letter sound and I'd write down the letter and he'd put it in a pile with the other sounds that were "made the same" -- b/p/m and s/z/t/d/n and k/g/ng/Russian-x/cat-hacking-up-hairball... and we just went on and on about how it all went together and why there wasn't a complete set of sounds at each location (voiced, unvoiced, fricatives, stops, whatever all the technical terms are that I can't remember anymore)... and we'd try to make the missing sounds (what kind of fricative can you get in the b/p/m set? and what does it sound like when you try?? LOL)

And then the kid's mom came home early and there we were lounging around in her living room surrounded by dozens of bits of paper with letters on them... Knowing her, I expect it was one of those things where she had read about the importance of coming home unexpectedly sometimes so you can find out if your babysitter is always watching TV or lets the preschoolers walk the dog down the highway unsupervised... I don't think she expected to catch the babysitter making apparently nonsensical piles of letters all over the living room rug. I think she always thought I was a weirdo anyway.

I thought of another cute one. My friends and I got into a habit of spelling everything we don't want our little ones to know. I do this with my husband and my mom too. One time I was in the car with my mom, DD5 (4 at the time) ,and DD4 (3 at the time) And I started spelling to my mom the plans of the day. My mom asked me to repeat what I just spelled because she didn't catch it all and my DD5(who was 4) piped up and said Grandma, mom said " we are going to the mall first, having lunch and if the kids are real good after shopping we will get some ice cream"

When my son was 2 1/2, we found that the secret messages my husband and I were spelling out to each other were no longer secret. When my son had just turned four we could pick up a book he hadn't read before and spell out all the words and he could quickly and easily identify them. His cousin, seven years older than my son and also very bright, watched him do this and was surprised that my son was getting the harder words faster than he could. At age 5, older kids in his acting class would try to find words that he couldn't get, usually science related words, but he always got those because his favorite book to read at that time was a science encyclopedia.

Last night, one of my son's cub scout leaders told me that he thought my son must read a lot. No matter what they discuss it seems like my son has read something about it and likes to share this knowledge.

So my son is a well-read gamer (isn't this an oxymoron?) who spends way too much time on video games but somehow reads enough on Wikipedia finding answers to his many questions.

We had a pretty big OMG moment a couple of days ago. During this weekend I was showing DS about numbers in different bases (base 2, base 16) because he's a patterns guy and similar to Kriston's DS. So I thought he'd like talking about why we have "digits" why we count in base 10, and how you could count with other symbols.

A couple of days later he went to his white board isle and titled it "1st grade binary" and started to write out 1 + 0 = 1, 1 + 1 = 10, 10 + 1 = 11, etc. I thought "oh he just memorized it" until he moved on to "2nd grade binary" and "3rd grade binary" with addition with carry over and subtraction with borrowing.

I am still shocked at that one.

JB

"There are 10 kinds of people in this world. Those that understand binary and those that don't."

Wow! That's amazing! very cool.

(I'm one of the people in your quote... so i guess i'll have to see if DH can later teach this stuff to DS4, who is also patterny.)

My DS fell asleep on my lap last night at 7:30 while enthusiastically watching election returns. He woke me up this morning at 4:30 because he needed to know right now, how many electoral votes Obama had received. I said 338 to McCain's 155 (late night numbers) to which he promptly replied WOW- that's 68 more than he needed!

A funny one of logic a few nights ago, while going to sleep. We have annual passes to Disneyland this year and DS was very disappointed that Small World was closed in October when we were there. We told him they were fixing it because the boats keep sinking and we haven't talked about it since.

Just before bed a few nights ago he sits straight up and exclaims "I'VE GOT IT! The boats keep sinking because people are too fat!" It took me a few minutes to figure out what the heck he was even talking about!

And yes... they are sinking because people are too fat, so they had to make the canals deeper.

JBDad--I love it! What a great little guy!

Do you know the books "How to Count like a Martian" by Glory St. John and "A History of Counting" by Denise Schmandt-Besserat? They're both kids' books about number systems, and have been much enjoyed here--maybe your son would like them, too.

Have a happy day!
minnie