I'm with you, I don't know how smart I ever was, but I'm definitely dumber now, after nearly a decade of lost sleep, split attention, and a focus on wiping butts and noses. Thank goodness both kids had early academic interests or else I'd never have a chance to learn something. I'm just coming out of the lingering intense babyhood season of life and it's surprising me how much it is affecting my sense of myself. (The joke now is that DS4 still wakes me up early in the night sometimes, and then quizzes me on math all day. Some kind of torture!)
Anyway, I'm one of those who realized how I line up with gifted checklists as I was reading to learn about my first child. I was a Regent's scholar here in California (as was DH), and I made a top group of 70 writers out of the whole state once as a teen, for a college summer program. AP, 4.0, all that. But I always just said I was a hard worker. Now I see my sensitivities as part of the deal, and finding friends in a new town, as an adult not in school, made me appreciate my nerdy, probably also gifted friends. I was never in the gifted program in elementary, because my parents thought "those kids were weird" and probably just couldn't handle driving me to a different school. Of course by mid high school I finally had a good group of friends, who had all been in the gifted classes together their whole schooling lives. Meanwhile I was hitting ceilings on big benchmark tests and reading assigned books in one day and having a hard time socializing. Ah well.
DH is probably smarter than me, although it's hard to tell as he's STEM and I'm humanities, in terms of strengths. His mom used to take workbooks to school because he already knew what they we're learning. He graduated suma cum laude, and is a very successful programmer.
But we both think DD is smarter than us. Maybe because she presents differently, so we are impressed, but she seems way beyond where we were as kids. And now DS is really starting up with math and science, too.
DH's dad is an accountant, and my mom is a childcare provider who won a scholarship to the UC system back in the day. She just dropped out because she got married and had a kid, and then wanted to do something where she could be at home with us. But she's pretty smart. DH and I are the big nerds of the family, though.
