Hey Rachael C - In hindsight, I wish I had kept better records of developmental milestones with my little ones. Perhaps you might learn from this and take good notes!! Deborah Ruf says that physical milestones are mostly irrelevant to giftedness however she has a whole list of 'academic' milestones that are more telling - things like colours, shapes, numbers, letters, word count, sentence structure, etc. Perhaps you might go through the list and make up a spreadsheet so that you have comprehensive notes about what and when your little one achieves certain milestones. This type of information is invaluable further down the track. But if not kept at the time, the data is often lost...
jojo
Thanks jojo! We actually do have a spreadsheet already! We originally started it because she was always so fun and funny and we wanted to remember her stories, but then her language grew and grew and we were using it as a way to track that, then the other milestones made their way there because we thought no one, not even us would believe these timelines unless we captured them.
I read a few articles on Deborah Ruf's site. Those are very informative. A few things I noticed that I didn't know wasn't quite the "norm" or wasn't sure was the "Understand adult directives and questions by 6-12 months". From about 4 months on, our daughter has been able to answer things like "where's dada/ duck/ kitty, etc", and int he last few months she can do things like "I think the kitty's need water" (turns the sink on), and "if you are all done with that, turn it off" (turns the toy or whatever off). She can also tell us things like "what does a kitty say" or for the Sandra Boyton fans "what do 3 singing pigs say" which she picked up as her opening line of her comedy act a few weeks ago :-). We have always felt like we have another adult in the house because of that :-P.
The other thing that stood out was the "independently looked at and turned pages of books by 11-15 months". She has been doing this since about 5 months. For books with actions or flip open windows, she turns each page and does all the actions in turn and then finishes the book and starts again. She even has a few books in her bed. When she wakes up in the night or early in the morning, the first thing she does is reads her books (and kisses the pages with animals on them ;)).
She has said 2 word phrases for quite some time, "Mama, go!", "Hi, dada", "more water", etc.
Anyway, there are others that stood out, but as I said I could go on and on and on! I'll save some for some other posts! Thanks again for the information!
*** So I read the article in its entirity and realized that the "milestones" that I selected were not representative of her timelines (books and understanding parents...like perhaps my daughter in those skills that are measurable right now may be at a Level 5 EEEK!
