Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Feedback please: Is this normal for your children?

Interesting, Ultramarina. Sure sounds like a PG child with those early milestones. Makes me think though. DS5 who tested PG did have impressive early milestones but nothing like OP or you describe. Advanced, yes, but nothing completely spectacular before 18 months old.

Once he hit 2 he really accelerated and by 3 he was reading at a 4th grade level and doing 1st-2nd grade math. This has continued and he is learning at lightning speed without being taught. It is really like magic.

I guess it really is very individual. I wasn't paying any attention to milestones, and "gifted" wasn't remotely on my radar, so maybe I just didn't see it. I certainly can't remember much, and since I'd never had a kid before, I had no idea what was normal. I do remember her being just several weeks old and staring at herself in a little mirror in her Moses basket. When she was about 18 months, I made a partial list of words she used, and it was around 200, including colors and numbers. But other than that, nothing ever hit me over the head. She was intensely interested in books and being read to, and began listening to full length novels by 3, but I thought that was because I read to her a lot. She didn't learn to read until she was 7, although she did so with limited instruction. (We unschool.)

Wow!!!! That is SO awesome... That stuff just blows me away. My two were not in ANY way gross-motor advanced. Not at all. They've just had cognitive/fine motor advancements. DD was bang on average and DS was delayed.

It's interesting. DD is in figure skating, and her anxiety is hampering her average ability. She is doing fine, but you can sure see the difference between the way she skates Vs. the non-perfectionist average-ability skaters. She can learn everything that she's taught (even won an award), but is very reserved and careful in her style, and is not at all expressive or performance-like.

She LOVES it though.. (you'd never know it to watch her). This makes me laugh and remember her fifth birthday when she got a gift she'd been hoping for from her cousin and she just stared, poker faced, at it. Cousin's Dad said "I thought she wanted that." and I said "She does!! She's thrilled!! That's her in-front-of people excited face!!" LOL that's how she skates. Very... deer in the headlights. Very... "the world will tumble like a house of cards if I make even one small mistake."

At 10 months my DD was just furniture walking and had just figured out what crawling was... (she didn't walk until 13 months, DS not until 15).

I'm blown away by your DD, ultramarina. What you describe is a phenomenal level of knowledge. She sounds remarkable.

A more general comment to all on my family background:

After doing some digging through old records with my parents, we've discovered that there is a known history of EG+ on my side of the family. Strangely, this had never come up before.

My dad is a retired fighter pilot and had to sit a battery of psych tests over the course of his recruitment. His evaluations consistently ranged EG+. (Though, he is quick to say that he thinks IQ tests are overblown and insists that he isn't remarkable.) I learned that my mother was doing university calculus and algebra courses in high school. I've always thought she was wired differently, since she has unusually low sleep requirements (<4 hours/night long term), and this is just another tidbit that supports my hypothesis.

Also, apparently my parents were told that I had received one of the highest scores ever tested in the province (Ontario) on the universal standardized test I referenced earlier (CTBS). I never knew this.

Yes, it's interesting. Meanwhile, my DS was mildly advanced at age 2 but nowhere near DD in his capacity to make you go "Whoa." For a while I worried about having one very gifted child and one child who was bright, but likely not gifted. Fast forward to DS learning chess at 3 and reading chapter books at 4. One area where he is still far behind DD at the same age is drawing and writing, but DD is notably gifted in these. (Although....her drawing ability was relatively more impressive at 4 than it is now. She still has an incredible artistic sensibility and skills, but at 4 she was sort of jaw-dropping.)

It's possible that DD is as gifted as she once appeared but that this is being obscured by other issues (she is dxed with anxiety and depression and may yet receive a dx of ADHD, ODD, or ASD). Her daily emotional struggles take up a lot of time and energy these days. However, she was a very challenging toddler as well.

Another interesting thing about DD is that she has synesthesia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia), which we did not discover till she was 6. I believe her brain is very unusually wired in a lot of ways. Much of her early precocity was memory-based, and she does continue to have an incredible memory, but that takes you only so far (doesn't allow you to understand advanced math, for instance). It certainly helps in school, though. (Memorizing math facts is effortless, for instance.)

Look at that--I didn't even know this, but it certainly sounds like DD: "Little is known about what, if any, cognitive traits might be associated with synesthesia... What has been confirmed is elevated, sometimes photographic, memory."

Ohhh... that's interesting! I thought I had that in my 20s (did some further reading and ruled it out, or maybe mine is mild). For me it was imagery and colours associated with sounds. I did have a memory that was somewhat photographic (not sure if it truly was.. have lost some of it) and I'm extremely visual-spatial, just like my DS.

How did you discover your DD has it?

Ok, this is me (somewhat):

Wikipedia: "Sound often changes the perceived hue, brightness, scintillation, and directional movement. Some individuals see music on a "screen" in front of their faces. Deni Simon, for whom music produces waving lines "like oscilloscope configurations – lines moving in color, often metallic with height, width and, most importantly, depth. My favorite music has lines that extend horizontally beyond the 'screen' area."[3] Loud tones are brighter than soft tones, and that lower tones are darker than higher tones. Synaesthetes nevertheless choose more precise colours than non-synesthetes and are more consistent in their choice of colours given a set of sounds of varying pitch, timbre and composition.[29]"

Sounds have colour and visual texture to me, and if someone asks what something/someone sounded like, I'm at a loss to explain it unless I can say something like "fuzzy and yellow, with jagged edges."

I've often thought of it as signals mixing because of increased sensitivity (sort of like feedback from speakers).

Ultramarina I'm really curious to know how you identified this in your DD.

(I love this forum )


EDIT - found your earlier thread & reading it now http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....5419/Synesthesia_seeing_colors_with.html

Yes, there seem to be a lot of different flavors of synesthesia. You can take a battery here: http://synesthete.org/ I'd love to have DD do it, but like I say it, she seems to be sort of uninterested in her own exceptionality.

It is supposed to be highly heritable. I don't have it...but...I am highly visual when drowsy and will sometimes see a color or texture in my mind associated with particular thoughts or emotions. But only when sleepy. It isn't dreaming--I'm awake at the time.

Oh, and we discovered it in her completely by accident when she referred in a matter-of-fact way to a number's color. I think she was saying that something looked wrong because the number was in color and it, of course, isn't that color. (As with many synesthetes, this sort of bothers her.)

You know! I was talking earlier about how DD learned letters, numbers, and colors extremely early (all were in place by 14 months). Since syn is thought to occur when connections that are supposed to be "pruned" in infancy don't get pruned...I wonder if this could be associated with her very early number/letter learning?

Hmmm... could be. Both DD and myself were really early with letter/number recognition. Interesting. DS was "a little" early - maybe he missed the cutoff? Or maybe he has another variation of syn that I haven't identified yet? Interesting. I would have thought he'd be more syn because he's so visual/spatial and sensory, but the spelling and memory (DD & I) seem to be more connected.