DD at that age definitely made
way out there spatial/verbal connections. They went over most peoples' heads, thankfully.
What I mean by that is that my 3yo should probably
not actually have been remarking on how such-and-such illustration in a children's book reminded her so much of WTC North Tower, nor that prominent citizen arrestee on the front page of the paper looked an awful lot like The Wizard of Oz. Or "Mama, what does {adult full sentence overheard at the library two weeks ago} mean?"
Honestly, if
I weren't HG+ and also highly attuned to my surroundings and the visual/verbal landscape around me,
I would not have known where she picked the stuff up, and then she REALLY would have looked amazing, coming up with full sentences like that and us thinking that they were
de novo. Well, they weren't. But the sheer SIZE of the 'bits' that she wanted labels and definitions for, and wanted to categorize or create mental Venn diagrams for was very very different from other children her age. It was the same exact behavior, ultimately, as a child pointing and asking "what's that?" but on a scale that was orders of magnitude away from it. She wasn't selective-- it's just that nobody else really anticipated that a sound-bite from CNN would be the subject of an information grab as much as a sentence from Elmo or Mr. Rogers, and she definitely wasn't just a parrot-- she understood context and knew if you made something up, or didn't understand her questions, and she'd get MAD at us over that. I often had to really flex my own brain to know WHY she wanted to know something so that I'd know WHAT she wanted to know. Yeah, prescription drug adverts on the tv were a real treat during those years, and my DH loves to watch sports.
She has almost no memory-- NOW-- of those years, but she very clearly did remember them until she was 8 or 9 years old. It is also interesting that much of it has clearly been internalized and used to build her vocabulary and understanding of how the world works.
DD is not at all on the spectrum-- she's probably the polar opposite.
