Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school Advanced Baby? - Intro

I've been lurking here for a few months. This is sort of my introduction to see if anyone else thinks my daughter could possibly be gifted.

My daughter is 7.5 months old.

She smiled at 3 weeks, grabbed things at 2 months, sat supported at 3 months, sat alone at 4 months, crawled at 5 months, pulled up at 6 months, threw a ball (played ball back and forth) at 6 months, and is cruising and walking holding on to only one of our hands at 7.5 months. I predict 2-3 weeks to first steps.

She opens drawers and cupboards to pull stuff out, "got" object permanence awhile ago (always would come up to me and try to get into my shirt for food lol and finds things easily that are hidden.)

She didn't start babbling or making much noise until 6 months when she started with with baba and clicking her tongue. Now she just experiments with different consonants.

At 3 months would spend up to 40 minutes concentrating on taking apart this stacking toy she has and I am not sure exactly when she started doing this, but I have her on video around 3 months turning the pages of her board books (I had to lift the page up a little) when I said "Turn the page!" She would study pictures in books really really early.

She looks for daddy and doggy when I ask where they are and has for at least 2 or 3 months now. The other night I was in the bathroom and my husband was trying to teach her the baby sign for milk and she said "mama". It had to be a coincidence, though...?

Her pincer grip is improving a lot and she's recently started touching things she shouldn't just so she can crack up when I say "No" to her.

She isn't an easy baby and stays up for days with short naps and then finally crashes for 5 or 6 hour nap some days. We had to endlessly walk around with her in sitting position even right after birth and show her things so she wouldn't cry, though she was dairy intolerant and I didn't figure it out right away.

I don't know what else to say. According to my books, she has passed almost all the milestones leading up to 12 months.. except when it comes to saying words. I know giftedness can be hereditary. I was slower according to my baby book (though still somewhat ahead) and my mom says I missed the gifted program by 2 points when I was 6, so who knows.

You may want to consider beginning to learn and teach her sign language. Studies have shown that this does not delay spoken language development, may in fact improve later language development, and cuts down on a whole bunch of infant and toddler frustration. My friends who have taught it to their babies have been very pleased with the results.

Ugh! Point system cutoff for a gifted program. How medieval!

Lol, what is the alternative to a point system cutoff? I don't even know what my score was and my mom says the class was full and they didn't want to test me but she made them. She thinks they lied about the results so they wouldn't have to open a second class, but they can't do that... can they?

Anyway, she is showing zero interest in baby signs so far. I keep trying to teach her the sign for milk, but she just grabs my shirt instead or makes a specific noise if I ask her if she wants milk.

Hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? The shirt-grabbing is working for her.

My experience is much more with Special Education, where federal law dictates that information be gathered from a variety of sources, and that educational decisions be made by a team that first reviews that information.

Making a decision before the meeting, based on a single score, or based on available resources are all mistakes that could land a school in a world of trouble under IDEA and state laws. The laws governing gifted education are much less ironclad, but I would consider a similar approach to those educational decisions to be best practices, at the very least.

I don't know if you child is gifted, heck I don't even know if mine are! I would say, however that you are dealing with a lot of the same issues that I did, and that those issues led me to this forum when my eldest was 3. I have found the information, advice and help here to be very useful. My oldest son was so intense and exhausting, and most people just didn't get it.



This sounds a lot like my oldest and youngest children. I remember in the morning I would push my DS's bassinette to the fishtank, where he would watch the fish while I sprinted to the bedroom, threw on some clothes and sprinted back. By then he would be bored of the fish and start screaming!

I would say if you like it here and find it helpful, stay around. There are lovely people here.

And, if you haven't already, investigate babywearing, it was a sanity-saver for me!

Oh yes, I own many many carriers. I got kind of crazy about them for awhile. I'm kind of sad because she is almost walking and I feel like I won't get to babywear as much.

I know exactly what you mean about the fish tank. We co-slept, but I had this bassinet that I attached a musical mobile to. I'd put her in the bassinet so I could go to the bathroom or whatever and do whatever I had to do as quickly as possible. I only got 5-10 minutes at a time out of that thing.

People would always tell me things like "Oh, just put her in the bouncer while you cook dinner or take a shower."

hahaha yeah right.

I never understood where people were coming from with this either? Pigs might fly.

Especially pigs might fly if you find you're reading Sandra Boynton books all day

(Just chiming in with my own "I hear ya" -- not sure if mine is particularly smart, but he's a handful, and had similar early milestones. Oh, just FYI: Mine cruised hours a day from 4 mos, walked once a week from 7, and didn't actually walk untill 11. Experienced mamas (like, the ones with 7-12 kids) told us he'd be walking full time "by the end of the week" for about 5 months. So... erm... don't get too excited about getting able to stand up strait just yet

We had a huge developmental change just around 7-8 mos, where he started being *late* on most official milestones, but made huge gains in areas I now realize are more typical 3 yr old things.

-Unnr

We had a lot of the same questions as you, so I started with a few books (here's the first one I looked at) and checked websites (like About.com-searching "Early Signs of Giftedness") for info on what the tested gifted child typically was doing when they were babies. That answered the question for me.

Like your child, my son was a screamer. He demanded to be carried around all the time. But unlike yours, he hated the baby carriers, so I ended up with "tennis elbow" from the weight of hauling him from room to room so he could switch on & off the light switches, look into closets, peruse the artwork, etc. Did I mention he was in the 96th percentile for weight?

One thing that he loved was the Baby Einstein videos. I knew that the AAP said not to allow children under two to watch TV, but I was desperate for a shower or toilet! I'd put him in his swing or playring, and pop one in. He would watch a half hour at a time before squirming for something else.
( Story-There was a scene in one of those videos where two elephants were sitting at a bistro table...there was a flower in a vase and salt & pepper shakers sitting on top. One elephant would sniff the flower and act like it was heavenly, then when the other was about to sniff it, the first would point behind him and when his attention was off the flower, his companion sneakily peppered the flower. When the other elephant saw nothing behind him, he shrugged and turned back around to sniff the flower...of course sneezing like only an elephant could! My son would laugh and laugh at that. It was the first "joke" he "got". He was about six months old. Later, he told me his first joke at three.)

I second the recommendation to keep trying to teach the sign language. Our son used it for about six months, and I think it cut down on his frustration tremendously.