Anyone that thinks that a parent with this kind of kid is a "wimp" for quailing visibly at the thought of adding a newborn to the mix...
hasn't lived with one of these human Tsunamis.
I'm laughing out loud at the $2 per-second toy cost. Oh my. YES.
I'm also nodding at "alone time." We childproofed several areas of the house as well as humanly possible so that this was feasible.
Don't be too surprised when schooling-- even with acceleration, even with GT differentiation, even with all of the other tricks that you can muster-- is a ROUGH, ROUGH road with one of these kids. They are all about mastery and full immersion, and they don't tolerate fools, low-level or repetitive information, or drill well. At all. They want to master and then check it off of some life-list or something. My personal hypothesis when DD was about four was that she was actually an alien who was touring the planet and wanted to pack as much in as possible. This helped me to mentally manage my expectations when she would do the $2/second thing-- and she did. (And how)
The other problem with the longer attention span thing (and this might be advice, and maybe not, because truthfully I'm not sure that I could have survived the alternative)--
if they go into a schooling environment with a 1-3hr attention span (or, heaven help you-- LONGER), this is going to be a huge problem. Schools are set up for 10-minute 'activity' times for kids 4-6yo. Period. Even those things supposedly intended for HG children, it's seldom any better than a 30-40 min stretch, and then it's "stop, do something else, now let's do this different thing instead..."
Which drives kids like this berserk. Just noting that.
