Gee -your child sounds much like mine was and still is :-) My DS5 is addicted to anything math and numbers - you described some of the exact same things my little guy was in love with doing. He used to flip through paperbacks that i was reading and get excited about finding out how many pages long the book was. Same thing with the phone book - he would figure out the various patterns (different colored pages meant different info found...) and would ask me to tell him something to look up and would then go to find it and tell me different phone numbers we could call to get info. I haven't seen any of this lead to an issue other than one time when he was playing drive through window with his scooter (he would drive around our kitchen on his scooter and would stop at the "window" and we would give him a math problem that he had to solve and then he would get his "order of pretend food" and would do this over and over - he played the game for almost 2 hours and then when we told him it was time to get ready for bed you would think the world was ending). We weren't too worried about it - he also loved many other things as well but numbers/patterns/math have always been a love of his. We lead him into other activities as well and would find creative methods to introduce a new concept or bring an activity to a new level. He has trouble relating to others at his school and always has - he is the oldest child now in his Montessori preschool and while he wants to explore much higher up concepts, the others all want to run around playing Pokemon....so we have found that he relates very well to kids that are between 7-8 years old and we try to find different activities that allow him to be around older children outside of school....have you seen your child around older children - you might be surprised how he reacts...
