Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums When did your gifted child talk/walk as baby???

DD7 did not hit milestones remarkably early. She was an extremely "alert" baby, however, and people frequently commented on it. I think there was a lot going on in her head that didn't show until later.

She said her first words at 8 or 9 months, but didn't start talking up a storm until about 16 months. When she did start talking, her pronunciation and usage was unusually good and her vocabulary extensive. She read at a simple level at age 3 and with fluency at 4.

She walked at about 11 months, and started out in slow motion. She hardly ever fell. It was more like she just didn't do a lot of any one thing until she felt she already had it mastered.

I think so and it might explain alot about my oldest. I don't specifically remember the milestones, but there are somethings that I can even see carrying to her current school issues. I don't remember when she actually started to talk, since she is just quieter in general, but well before 1 year, she would put her hands out in front of her, like in a pushing away gesture and say, what sounded like "monkey shoes". DH and I both noticed, then realized it was her way of saying she was done with something so we accepted it...eventually, her ability caught up with her intellect and we realized she had been saying "No thank you". She also put herself to bed on a vacation when she was maybe 22 mo. She just came in, announced that she was going to bed and off she went. She didn't really crawl (we do have hardwood floors)but went straight to walking and her favorite color has been black since she was two.
I guess part of my point is that I am suspecting she is one of those kids that has little patience for steps or really "discovering" but would like you to give her the whole thing all at once, kwim? It's like she goes straight to the end...

ok, now I'm cracking up because I see so many things that I too thought were just normal. Probably because I didn't really have any basis for comparison...

Lol. This reminds me...

One of DD's first combination of words was "Mimi (spoken,) Girl (spoken,) Boat (signed,) Hat (signed)" She would go through this combination every time she saw a particular picture in one of her books. It was a picture of a little African American girl wearing a hat with a bow on it. (Mimi was a character from another book that was a monkey the exact same color as this little girl.) So this was her way of describing this girl. Signing boat was a good enough approximation for "bow" in her mind, and well, it worked. This was at about 15 months old.

For weeks she kept saying what we thought was "mimi girl" in the car all. the. time. We just thought she really liked the picture of the little girl. Weeks and weeks went by, maybe even a month, until her speech cleared up enough to start hearing "Green means go." She was saying this phrase every time she saw a green light.

My daughter was already tracking objects with her eyes and lifting her head up before she even left the hospital. She skipped crawling altogether and went straight to walking somewhat late at 13 mos, and then was running maybe 2 weeks later. I don't think the idea of crawling ever occurred to her until she heard my wife talking about how she'd skipped it. By the time she was two she could already throw a ball mostly in the direction she wanted it to go, and she could kick a soccer ball in a straight line every time.

We'd learned about baby signs and figured we'd do that when she got to six months, but she already had a word she could use to tell us what she wanted: "mama," "dada," "baba," "buh-bye," and "nite-nite" were obvious. She'd wave her hand over her nose and say, "phew!" when she needed a change, and she'd created "pasherfir" for her pacifier, since we'd never referred to it as a "binky." We had all the basics covered at 6 months except for "hungry," but a couple months later that was a problem solved when my mom started watching her in the afternoons, and she learned "num-num" from grandma. She had a handful of other words, too, and if she didn't have a word or couldn't make herself understood, she'd just point, and I'd carry her over to whatever her fingers led to.

She played her first prank when she was about four months. I was getting her ready for bed and started changing what I thought was just a wet diaper, then yelled, "BABY!!!" so my wife could bring me the supplies I'd need for the disaster I'd just uncovered. Once I got her cleaned up, my daughter started shouting something unintelligible, and finally my wife stuck her head in, and my daughter busted a gut. It took us a while to figure out she was trying to imitate my "BABY!!!"

When she was two I had my "G*d d*mn" Stupid fishy" moment. My wife had a habit of twisting the car seat straps further every time she traveled, and I'd just placed my daughter in the car seat to find them more mangled than usual. As I was trying to sort them out with my daughter in the way, I whispered, "Damnit" under my breath. She gave me such a mischievous grin and said it back to me with such ferocity that I couldn't help but double over and laugh, in amusement and embarrassment. Of course, now I'd just rewarded the behavior, and so she kept doing it. When she did it for my wife, she laughed, too. The only fair thing to do now was to taper off the reactions slowly, which we did... though not before she'd performed for my holier-than-the-pope grandmother, naturally.

My 9yodd was born a month early. The doctors thought she might have been a little earlier than they had originally calculated because of some of the difficulties she had in the NICU. She smiled while still in the NICU and would calm immediately upon hearing my voice even when getting an IV changed (the nurses thought that and the way she looked right at people completely alert was amazing).

Her gross motor skills were not all that advanced unless you adjust for her prematurity...sat at 5 months, crawled on hands and knees at 7months, crawled on hands and feet like a crab at 10 months, and walked a week after her 1st birthday. She was potty trained for bowel movements at 11.5 months.

Her speech was more advanced...she said her first "word" at 4 months old (we called breastfeeding ninny and she would cry nin-nin when hungry) soon followed by mama and dada, had 12 words at 6 months and began signing, had over 50 word vocabulary plus over 50 signs and putting words together by 9 months, memorized whole books at 11 months, "read" them back to me, and sang songs in tune. She spoke in multi-word sentences using adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns correctly at 16 months. By 18 months she continued to memorize every book I read to her more than once and had a huge song repertoire though sometimes the words she thought someone was singing were very funny. She spoke like an adult by the time she was 20 months old using complex sentence structure and a huge vocabulary. She never really "babbled" as a baby and was always easily understood and very clear with her speaking.

Her fine motor skills were advanced as well...she wrote her name at 16 months and me other fine motor milestones at least twice as fast as average.

DYS PG-DS10 didn't talk for real until some time into Speech Therapy . His first sentence was "I love to jump" as he sprang off a couch. He was over 2 at the time. I didn't keep notes of every milestone but i took lots of video with commentary.

But, DS DID say this one word as a baby. We thought he was trying to say Mama but it turned out it was the name of this other baby girl that he was kind of obsessed with. We figured it out when her Christmas photo came and he flipped out over the photo! He was 8 months at the time and had known her since he was only weeks old. All those months I thought he was trying to same mama but he was definitely trying to say her name, not mama. After that he would only lay still for a diaper change if i gave him the photo.

Also, he liked numbers before he could really talk. I didn't catch it all at the time but I have the videos and I have since realized some of what I missed. There is video of him pointing out letters & numbers on a playset at the park and I just thought he wanted to climb again. Pointing at a "3" excitedly, exclaiming over and over, "fee! fee! fee!" as I took him the other way by the hand and also climbing the steps as a little one and counting "unn, ooohhh, feeeee" I was expecting little kid babble. He was probably not talking to me because he thought I didn't understand him! lol poor kid!

So, while at 18 months he wasn't really talking, wasn't communicating with us, he had been grunting, pointing & biting out of frustration! Also made up some of his own signs. But the speech therapist, using a writing board, figured out the kid new all his letters, could read words, new all the shapes you could think of (trapezoid, etc) he started to count up and down as his language skills emerged. his countdown was so cute too, from 10 down to 3, 2, 1, zeeeewooooooh. lol Then, more frustration for him, he couldn't express what was in his mind and he was shouting what I called "catch phrases" at us! We worried about echolalia but it wasn't. By 2.5 he was expressing himself well and was freaking people out in public all the time. In the park there would be skip counting and negotiating: "i want to go on the slide 80 more times...counting on 10s!" lol I'd get funny looks! It all worked out and he's a wonderful public speaker, has a great voice, amazing vocabulary and corrects my grammar constantly.

Walking - well, on his 1st birthday I said "that's it bub, walk" and I stood him up, moved a few feet back and he walked to me. After that he pretty much RAN 24/7. lol

MG/HG DD8 had some a few words at age 1 (mama, thanks, 1,2,3) then stopped abruptly which had us all worried. She had speech therapy at 18m until gr K. She had major articulation probs. She's perfectly fine now

She was cruising and starting to walk at 1.

So, does this fit the mold for gifted kids? Seems like so many have the super-early milestones.

DD7 started walking very early just short of 10 months. She was singing the alphabet song at 18 months, was able to use scissors at two years old, and could speak in full intelligible sentences well before she turned 3. She learned to read simple Dr. Seuss type books before kindergarten and now in second grade reads at about a fourth grade level. DD7 is very bright but has not been formally identified as gifted.

DS6 didn't start walking until 13 months. He didn't start talking until he was almost 3, but when he did he spoke in full sentences, but had trouble with certain sound combinations and still has some trouble pronouncing certain words. DS6 was recently identified as gifted when the school gave him the WISC-IV.

My younger son walked at 9 months; my older at 12 months, although he had had major skull surgery at 3 months, which maybe delayed him.
Both boys "talked" with baby sign language by at least 6 months. They responded with the appropriate signs if you asked them. When my older one was 13 months old, I said (without gesturing), "walk to the door and touch it." And he did it! He obviously had a receptive vocabulary at that point.

The one thing I clearly remember is when my son was two and he would arrange his magnet letters into sentences across the floor. He would take the numbers and do problems such as 2+8=10. I went to many garage sales picking up buckets of letters and numbers for him to do this with. You only had to show him how to do something once and he would remember it.
When we would go for walks he was fascinated with license plates on cars. He would search for unique, out of state plates. This was difficult when we would go to the store or any place with a large parking lot. He would want to cruise the lot in search of license plates from different states. Then he would remember how many of each we noticed, 4 Washington, 2 Oregon and so on. Walking through the store he would repeatedly talk about the plates, color, how many had letters and numbers. He clearly had obsessions.
At about 3 his new obsession became states and capitals. In a few short weeks after he knew all of them by shape of the state he started talking about routes from one end of the country to another. He would create long lines of people at the store while he talked. I clearly knew at that point this wasn't normal. Then obsessions with shows and characters like Thomas the Train. Knew details about every train character and when they started on the show, color, favorite paths, etc. Obsession is still a big one. He gets obsessed with a subject and exhausts it then moves on. Like a tornado. lol
The subtle hints were liking older children, trying to teach others, wanting to discuss WHY about everything. Example, it's time for bed, why? The why's went on and on. Then in the end he would usually come up with reasons WHY NOT. lol
At school they finally moved him up because he was getting in trouble trying to teach first graders division. Because he was in the first grade gifted class they wanted to learn it. It was distracting. lol So now he is a small fry in an older class but loves it.
As time goes by there really isn't any way to ignore it. Ignoring it becomes harder to do than acknowledging it. That is what I've experienced. No way not to know.


Currently he is eight years old and in the fourth grade gifted classes for english lit, science, history and sixth grade math, Algebra. It's still amazing to me year after year. It's like the song that never ends. You can't help planning every step of the way. There is nothing traditional about it.