I have had to get used to people watching and listening to us because of my son's differences.
At 2 1/2 he started spelling some words instead of saying the words--his name, stop, go, girl, boy and he was very talkative and his voice carries really well so people really started noticing him them, but they didn't say anything. We just got some strange looks.
I tried to ignore other people looking at us and just have fun with it. My son enjoyed identifying words that I spelled out for him so I didn't stop when we were in public. Older school age kids would see us doing this and they would spell out their hardest spelling words for him and he was usually able to identify them. My son, the only kid at home, loved the attention. Before he started kindergarten some kids would also ask him math questions, including multiplication and negative numbers and he was pretty good at that too, but not as good as he was with words. He just doesn't love math the way he does words and literature and history and science.
When he was about four, a middle school aged gifted cousin who met him for the first time, told us she had heard him using metaphor and simile when he talked to her and she was really surprised at this. When he was around older kids it wasn't unusual to have one of them run up to me to tell me something he had just said. When he joined a musical theater group at 4 1/2 we got a lot of comments from the older kids. One teen aged boy told us he thought my son had to be autistic or something when he memorized over 300 words of script and all the words to the songs in Babes in Arms. When my son was seven, he said he thought my son was a adult in a little kid's body.
Doctors told us that he seemed to be "high IQ" and that he would do well in school. The month he turned four, his doctor called in another doctor to watch him as I spelled out words from a probably 4th or 5th grade level book that he had never seen before and my son identified all the words correctly, but he wouldn't just read the book and I later learned that he had vision issues along with motor dyspraxia and hypotonia. Because my son is twice exceptional and cannot get an appropriate education in public school and would would also have to deal with bullies, we must homeschool.
Strangers often tell us he talks like an adult. When he was barely seven, he read an interesting newspaper article to his dad as we were eating our continental breakfast at our motel and then went on to tell us his opinion. He started talking to other people there and as we were leaving the motel clerk told us that he predicted that he would some day be a politician.
People like to predict what he will be some day and usually they say college professor, engineer, or politician, but his sister and a friend add stand up comic to that list. Since he has family members in all of these professions, except stand up comic, I think it will be interesting to see what he ends up doing later in life. Maybe he will try them all. My husband's former boss, a Mensa member, was a lawyer who had first studied to be a doctor. A woman that worked in his office had a law degree but decided that she was happier as a librarian, then tried an office job that required legal knowledge. I think that is the really good thing about being so smart. There are so many possibilities to choose from.
My son is usually okay with people watching him. He loves performing in front of people and he loves making people laugh with his ability to make jokes about any situation. Sometimes he will make some smart remark when he notices people watching him, like once we were having lunch in a museum cafe and my son was talking when everybody else stopped and started watching him. He stopped in the middle of his sentence and looked around and said something like "It's really quiet in here all of a sudden, did somebody call for prayer?"
