Hi,
I'm completely new here so I'm not sure where this goes. I just really need somewhere to express my feelings about what's going on with DD.
She's really young still (only 6 months) so I feel kind of strange posting on most gifted forums because everywhere I've read said that you can't tell at this age. But the thing is, is that she's really freaking me out and I just don't feel like I can talk to any of my other mom friends about this. Whenever I do, I get the impression that they feel bad that their kid isn't doing the same. Some have even started making up nicknames for my daughter. I've had a number of moms express worry when their ND child isn't doing the same things as DD and that's not my intention at all. Which means I don't talk about what she's doing, and that stresses me out even more!
She's been running ahead on all her milestones but what really set off some bells was our 4 month well baby visit. Our pediatrician freaked out about how well our daughter was sitting up on her own, standing, etc. She said DD was the most advanced baby she's ever seen (and we go to a very busy practice in a very larger city). She kept asking about milestones that she'd hit and she'd done all of them up to 6 months and even some a lot farther past that.
Now moving ahead to 6 months she's all over the place. She can pull herself up to standing, crawl, roll everywhere, pick stuff up with the pincer grasp, drops things on the ground and watches them, even colors a bit, points to objects (like when we ask where the trees are). We've been teaching her baby signing too. We started at 4.5 months and she would almost immediately react to some of them and now at 6 months she can sign 5-6 words and responds to more.
She's also extremely social. She'll watch other kids like a hawk (especially older ones) and she tries to interact with them and will "talk" to them (she doesn't speak yet but does her baby talk). She does say "up", though, when she wants to be picked up in the air.
I guess, I'm writing this because I feel so overwhelmed. I don't know how I'm going to be able to keep up with her and I'm freaking out about schooling. I tested into the gifted program at my school in 1st grade and was bored out of my mind most of the time until HS where they offered numerous AP classes. language courses and I became obsessive about some of my extracurricular activities. I still skipped most of HS and past at the top of my class. DH was the same except his HS was horrible and he almost failed out. Went on to be the top student in college/grad school. I fear that she'll have the same problems with school and that we won't be able to afford anything better early on (dh and I are both starting our careers and there's just no way we can afford private school at this point or anytime soon).
Plus, as much as I love her she is so demanding. She goes nuts when she can't do thing (she was desperately trying to crawl since she was about 3 months old). Now she's moved on to standing up and trying to walk (gets extremely agitated when she can't do it). She cries if I stop reading to her and I basically have to hid all books out of her line of vision if we need to move on to something else. She's readjusted her nap schedule so she is awake almost the entire time I'm home from work except when I go to sleep for the night.
I could go on and on but I've already written a novel. I just don't know where to go to talk about this since it seems that it's completely taboo to talk about an advanced baby.
