I hope it's ok for me to just jump right in. I posted a few days ago about some informal testing we had done for DS6 and everyone was so nice and helpful, I thought I'd hang around
I'm Kimberly, I have 3 kids, DS6, DS4, and DD 22mo. They are all so different from each other and yet so demanding and needy in their own ways. We are homeschooling for now (pulled DS6 from Kindergarten about 3 months before the end of school because it was a disaster), but I feel so ineffective and 10 steps behind all the children.
So, how do others do it? Between
obsessing wondering if I'm over thinking the things they do and I'm just *wrong* about them being gifted, worrying about what it says about me that I'm pretty convinced that all 3 of them are gifted and trying to actually survive this mad house (and I mean that in the most loving way, lol), I feel like I'm going off the deep end!
I keep thinking if they're not gifted, if every parent goes through this with multiple children, how the heck did humans survive? Because after a day of being bombarded from all sides I feel like my head might explode if I have to answer one more question and I begin to understand why some species eat their young, lol.
I put my description of the kids at the end of the post, it is really long winded, and I'm so sorry I can't seem to edit it down more, I just haven't been able to put down all the things I see and worry about before. I keep reading about levels of giftedness, I have no clue where they fall, so forgive me if I emphasize things that are pretty standard "gifted kid behavior"
I would love to know if every parent of multiple gifted kids feels so overwhelmed? How do you make it through the day without babbling incoherently in a corner by 2pm? And if you homeschool- how do you do it with a possibly gifted toddler who refuses anything less than her own school work (and I haven't figured out what that would possibly be) while you're working with her brothers?
Thanks for any insight or ideas!!
Kimberly
DS6 taught himself to read a bit over a year ago and is now reading at a 4th grade level with decoding at a 5th grade. He's going through curriculum materials almost as fast as I can buy them, he ate up the Singapore math 1a/1b in 2 months and is only going to need about 1.5 months for 2a. I can't even figure out if he already knows this stuff or if he's just picking it up insanely quick. He asks random, insanely complicated questions that make me say things like "Well, it depends, um, first you have to know about, well, no first you'd have to understand...but then there's that...no, that's too hard to explain...um, let's look it up online" from sun up to sun down and it makes my head hurt.
DS4 is stubborn. He wouldn't say a word until he turned 2 and then he just started talking, full on conversations like he had always spoken. He decided last month he wanted to learn to read and learned to identify both upper and lower case letters in less than 2 weeks, he can tell you the sounds they make (including vowels) and write them. He also has gathered about 15 sight words since he decided to learn. He puts together 150 piece puzzles by himself and a week ago I showed him jigzone.com he is now a complete online puzzle addict and absolutely proficient at turning on the computer, getting online and going to the website all on his own. He is obsessed with death. He asks me constantly about how/if/when people and animals died. When he learned that dinosaurs were possibly killed off by a meteor (thanks DS6), he asked me if a meteor was going to come and kill people. I told him there are some things we just can't know and we have to try not to worry about them because we can't change them. I felt like a complete failure as a parent because I couldn't make him feel safe. When he overheard DS6 and I talking about how our sun was going to end, he asked if when it explodes it will kill people on Earth. When I told him that it wasn't going to happen for millions of years (thinking he was really worried about how it was going to affect him), he asked what about the people and animals who are alive then? How do you answer that?!?
And DD22mo, oh how I love her, but I think out of all the children she may actually send me to the loony bin. She refuses to sleep. She screams every time we put her in her room for nap/bedtime. When I finally relent and bring her to our room and that's when she decides she should show me all the cool things she's learned. When she was learning to talk about 6 months ago she would refuse to say more than a word or two during the day, but at night would wake me up because she wouldn't be quiet "Kitty, come here kitty", "Mommy, I hear TT talking" (TT is DS6's nickname), this from a child who wouldn't say more than a few words during the day. She woke me up 2 months ago to count to 5 for me. 2 weeks ago she woke me up counting to 11. She now has 1 to 1 counting up to 5 and she constantly brings me random bits of things to count with her during the day. She has started doing this freaky parroting thing where she repeats back phrases that any of us say (DH, me, or the boys) and then uses the phrasing later on in a completely different context. I feel like she's trying to learn shorthand for speaking, why bother with stringing words together when other people have already done the hard work for you, lol.
