I found this community a few weeks ago and finally collected the time (and nerve) to register and post. I'm GT myself (no clue what level - all I remember was a few tests and a weird and interesting meeting in the teachers' lounge in grade four, after which I got called 'gifted'... but that was 30 years ago and my parents weren't the types to ask a lot of questions as long as my report cards were good), and now I find myself suspecting that my 18-month-old son might possibly be GT as well. So I'm interested in learning as much as I can, so that I'm prepared in future to make appropriate school-related decisions and so on... but mostly, I've just been longing for somewhere that I can talk about his development without either making other mums feel bad or having it implied that I'm lying! *sigh*
A little background on DS:
He was extremely alert and active right from moment one - to the point that the delivery room nurses all commented on it in surprise - and extremely high-needs as a newborn. He first lifted his head to look around at one day old, rolled over and smiled before 1 month, laughed at about 5 weeks, sat alone at 3 months, pulled to a stand at 5 months, crawled and cruised at 6mo, walked at 8mo. At first I was just thinking that he was really into gross motor stuff and would maybe be a late talker (since I had heard that babies tend to concentrate on one or the other - mobility or language), but he started talking at about 10 months - which I didn't think was exceptionally early, but certainly not late.
Now, at 18 months, he:
- has a vocabulary of about 300 words (or at least, I gave up counting somewhere after 250)
- rote counts to 13, seems to understand actual number concepts up to at least 3, and recognizes some numerals
- recognizes most of the alphabet in uppercase (he's named all of them at least once, but some of them he knows better than others)
- names 10-11 colours ('grey' is still a bit dodgy)
- is starting to know how to spell his name
We haven't set out to "teach" him any of this stuff, we just follow his lead. And even before he was talking (or even mobile!) he had an obvious hunger for new experiences and a low tolerance for boredom... it just took a while for me to realize that not all babies/toddlers were like that, or at least not to the degree that DS is. (My first clue was the room full of blank stares I got when I enthusiastically told my local mum-and-baby group about how he'd enjoyed the Ontario Science Centre enough that we decided to get a family membership... when he'd just turned 6 months old.)
Anyhow, sorry this got more verbose than I'd intended, when I just meant to make an introduction! There are obviously kids here who are higher up the 'GT scale' than my DS (at least, going by the descriptions I've read), but I feel like I need to trust my maternal instinct and parent him on the assumption that he may be GT, rather than waiting around till he's school-aged for someone to test him, kwim? So I hope nobody minds if I join this little community.
