Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion When did you know?

DD is 3Y9M old. When she started speaking all the alphabets in sequence and 1-20 numbers in sequence by 17 months, or when she started speaking in compound sentences and started correcting our pronunciation or verbal grammatical mistakes by 21 months, or when we observed she could permanently register in memory pretty much anything from months ago, or even when we first started noticing what seemed like a strange sense of perfectionism and intense emotions – we didn’t really think much about anything.

Until a few months ago, when I just happened to read, rather accidentally, that there was a concept in this world called “Giftedness”. When I first read about it, a chill ran down my spine. Many of what I was reading suddenly seemed like describing DD. The speaking, the memory, the perfectionism, the emotional intensities, the Overexcitabilities, the intense curiosity that makes her ask "Why" "What if" "What happens if" questions all day along – all of it seemed to just fall in place. It seemed suddenly that we found the jigsaw where all the pieces just seemed to fit in place. Sometime ago, when I asked “What happened, how did you fall down?” just after she fell playing in the playground, she replied “Because I lost my Centre of Gravity. My tarsal hurts.”. And yesterday she got terribly upset when I mistakenly referred to Titanoboa as a dinosaur, "It's a snake. A biiig snake. It smells by licking. It has no venom. It's not a dinosaur."

Understanding DD has been a challenge for me and DW. She cannot sit still – she needs constant persistent movement and gets overstimulated by things which seemed to interest her. If not for the few hundreds of articles I’ve read, I’d probably be thinking ADHD by now. She revels in patterns – she makes patterns out of everything. Even as a 21 month old, during a Play & Music class we took her to – while all the kids were taking Maracas and shaking and throwing, she took the Maracas and started arranging them forming a semi-circle pattern. This pattern-seeking even extends to certain types of repetitive behavior – where, given a standard scenario at home or outside, she would repeat the same words or actions and expect us to follow suit and gets terribly upset if I turn on the lights – while it’s an activity within her daily pattern. Again, if not for all the articles this would’ve put up a red flag for ASD.

But thankfully, I understand her better than I would have done if I had never read that accidental article. But she continues to be a new project for us every single day. In a dire need of constant stimulation, intense physical activities to take the edge off, newer challenges, something to constantly keep her thinking – we continue trying several things soaking in every bit of resource we could find on the internet.

At her age, she is too little to even consider testing. We would probably consider testing when she’s around 6+ years, but not to get an IQ#, but more for us to understand her better, to ensure we know what may work best for her academically and at home, to understand how to help her leverage her strengths to keep her appropriately stimulated and to help us to help her manage her intensities and Overexcitabilities as she grows up.