Not unlike echofuzz, my FOO is clearly not representative of the overall population either. By the time we had children, I had re-calibrated my perceptions somewhat, owing to a few years in my profession, working with a wider range of the population, but left to my own devices, I might very well have seen our children as more or less average, or even a little slow, TBH. As it was, I had several years to learn exactly what the middle 50% of the population looks like, and to distinguish between bright, GT, and extreme outliers, not only qualitatively, but quantitatively, which I found to be helpful for identifying how to focus on the common experiences of parents, while lessening the sensation of otherness.
Because of my own childhood, I think our kids would have had to be in fairly rarefied extreme PG territory for me to be shocked by anything they did GT-wise. Instead of managing my own shock, I've leaned toward building skills for trying to help other parents to be not only not shocked by our children, but to develop more inclusive ideas of giftedness and value in their own children.
