When DS11 was around preschool age, I thought he might be a happy, well-adjusted average kid. He was different from my eldest, who was twelve years older (also gifted) and from a previous marriage. Eldest wanted to do math problems, puzzles and asked endless questions. Youngest wasn't interested in coloring, writing, puzzles, and the only questions he asked were those concerning his current obsessions. In preschool, the teacher remarked he preferred to play by himself on the playground and he wasn't reading yet, though we read to him.

He entered Kindergarten and by the end of the year the Kindergarten teacher noted that he was "worldly" among other things, and she started the works for testing the following year. He almost didn't get in to the gifted program because he was just short of the cutoff (I think he needed to be 99% or 98% and he was one percent under). His teacher's assistant brought up the fact he seemed to be beyond grade level in math and they tested him in math, though that wasn't the norm. He was added to the gifted pullout program soon after. He had some emotional "symptoms" of giftedness, which helped us to be more understanding, but really, for a long, long, time I thought he was very bright, but not necessarily more than that. EXCEPT, in 2nd grade he was able to write a story and read it aloud with amazing confidence, and he was able to sing solo in 2nd grade with inflection and character and seemingly no uneasiness. And then in 3rd he was writing amazing stories, stories I would type for him because his writing abilities were not up to the level of his mind. And he made movies. So...glimpses of giftedness, but I didn't think much more about it.
Then in 5th he took an above-level test called EXPLORE, and slowly, after researching what his DYS-level results meant, it dawned on me that maybe we'd been letting our ds coast through school with little effort and receiving too-little support from us. He'd by then learned to be hindered by his perfectionist tendencies, and I did wonder if the explore results were a fluke, but when the school tested him months later, the WISC backed up the explore results, right down to the higher verbal than math. (Ironically it was the reverse when he was first identified)
So I guess I'm one of those who didn't really know, and when I did, I didn't realize how gifted and how asynchronous his abilities were. When I had the information in my hands, things started making sense.

Last edited by KADmom; 08/15/13 10:12 AM.