1. When did you first expect giftedness in your child?

Never or always, I guess. She has the genes for it, and seemed to be as smart as I expected a kid to be. We considered the local gifted school for preschool, and I remember being concerned that DD (at not-yet-3) wouldn't score 90th percentile on the IQ test for entrance, but it wasn't that I didn't think she was that smart - I didn't think she'd perform for a stranger.

2. What milestones/traits (gross motor skills, fine motor skills, verbal skills, literacy skills, mathematical sills, social) really made you suspect giftedness?

None in particular. DD has always been a kid who played her cards close to the vest, so it's hard to know what she could do when. That said, there's been some weird stuff.

She could stand unassisted at 6.5 months (I stood her up in the hallway to take her picture, and she didn't fall over - she had no independent interest at all in standing.) She could walk at 9.5 months, and never fell down. Sat down, but it was always a controlled sit.

Somewhere I've got pictures she drew right before she turned 2 - a banana, complete with shading and a stem-shaped stem, and a train with wheels, windows, a smokestack, and clouds of smoke. She's never had any particular interest in drawing, either before or since, nor have I ever seen her draw anything that realistic in the 5 years since.

When she was 18 months or so, and had virtually no words (she flunked the 18-month speech screening for not enough words), she was walking beside the shopping cart and suddenly said "three." Now, she never said anything, so I puzzled over that for a minute, until I realized she was staring at the 3 on the box of diapers in the cart. "Yep, that's a 3." It was probably another year before I heard her say three again.

3. Did your child have any delays?

Probably not.

She flunked the speech screening at 18 months (not enough words) and 24 months (no two-word phrases), but passed the evaluation with a speech therapist at 26 months. She had all the 33-month milestones at that point, so I suspect I'm another "hard grader." She'd say ~10 words in a row, but slowly and deliberately, with long pauses between, which I didn't count as putting multiple words together because of the long pauses. She could always communicate just fine, and was never frustrated, even when she didn't talk (or sign, or anything) at all, so she didn't really talk until she was good at it.

4. Is your child 2E?

No: I don't have any reason to think so.

5. Has your child been tested?

Yes, sort of. The school did the OLSAT this past spring.

6. Is your child across the board gifted or quite asynchronous?

Short answer: not asynchronous.

She goes in fits and starts. She entered kindergarten not reading (which surprised everyone), and was picking her way through Marvin Redpost 3 weeks later (although that certainly wasn't pleasure reading other than in the sense she enjoyed the accomplishment - it was right on the border between "instructional level" and "frustration level"). Recently, she's really into math.

7. When your child was young (baby/toddler/preschooler), was their development fairly even or did they excel more in certain areas (gross motor skills, fine motor skills, verbal skills, literacy skills, mathematical sills, social)?

I'd guess fairly even, but like I said, she plays her cards close to the vest.