We always figured gifted, as DH and I both are comfortably into HG range.
But our lack of experience with child development meant that we didn't know just HOW far out there she was. At first.
We still don't, actually-- not having had any individual IQ testing to go by. On the other hand, she comfortably sails over CTY, TIP, and EPGY requirements at 3-7 years beyond her chronological age, and has since she was 5-6yo. So she's clearly at least EG, and probably PG, which is what we've figured since-- it wasn't the age at which she started reading (which is late by HG standards, even); it was the rate at which she transitioned to mastery. Her reading level has been about what a college-educated adult could muster since about 18 months after she learned to decode. Since she was about 7, she has read even adult level material with downright preternatural speed.
I'm piping up here because we weren't necessarily in denial. If anything, we found the prospect of just how gifted a little... disquieting... when we thought about it too hard. I wanted her to be a kid first, and a side show attraction not at all, and I suspected that having the number would launch her into freakshow status. I didn't want to know because it might change how we saw her. To be clear, though-- DD is evidently "simple" gifted-- meaning that she has no 2e matters muddying those waters, and she is not terribly ACADEMICALLY asynchronous, so in terms of accommodation, it wasn't necessary to know in order to know what to do with her.
I don't think that having the number would have led to better accommodation or advocacy, anyway. It's always been quite clear to the schools just what she is, too. They can SEE that she's a PG kid by her performance. It's just that (locally) they can't really do much in the way of authentically appropriate instruction for PG kids.
My FSIQ estimates on my DD started at about 140 when she was a toddler-- but I have had to revise them upwards several times during her lifetime. I think that we're probably fairly accurate on the basis of what she actually chooses to SHOW us, mind-- because the majority of people in her extended family have been tested using a S-B tool at one point or another, and so we have genetically-related examples ranging from 98 up through 168-174. So we have a better idea than a lot of people what the numbers can mean in a functional sense, and what they don't. Nobody in my family or my DH's has cured cancer or won a Nobel Prize, but there are definitely patterns of social distress, multipotentiality gone wrong, perfectionism, existential struggles, etc. Now at 14, I'd place her toward the very top end of that range in a functional sense, and fortunately, her personality is not dissimilar to the two individuals in that range (one on my side, one on her dad's). That has been helpful in terms of knowing what she might need help with, and why. But in a functional sense, we only see what she chooses to demonstrate on any given day, too, and mostly that leads to underestimation.
It may be interesting to see what that value actually is at some point. It's possible that she's +4 or +5 and not +3 standard deviations like we think, but in any case, that leads us into waters that are merely "slightly more uncharted" from a place where the navigational directions aren't so good to start with, so from a parenting standpoint, it matters little from what I can tell. She's a singularity either way.
