My older son (who is now 19) at any given moment seemed to have average (or lower) intelligence with occasional flashes of brilliance from birth to age 7 or so. When he was 7, he was tested by the school in an attempt to discover why he struggled so much with learning and his IQ came back in the double digits.
When the older one was 8, his brother was 2 and acting very obviously gifted (extremely verbal, learning to read, that sort of thing). That's when I started reading about dyslexia and giftedness and 2e and it seemed to describe my son perfectly. A few years later, the dyslexia and the giftedness were confirmed with testing. Now, as a young adult, the giftedness is very apparent and the difficult aspects of dyslexia are much less so.
We also had the younger one tested. When comparing scores from testing done on the older one at age 12 and the younger one at age 7, the GAIs are within 10 points of each other without extended norms and 15 points with. The most glaring difference in their profiles is in working memory--the younger one's WMI was something like 40 points higher than the older one's.
So, in our case, obvious giftedness in one child caused us to look beyond the school's diagnosis of "just slow" in the other--and I'm so glad we did.
