Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Wiped out with a tornado DS

Oy vey! 90 minute sleep increments! Portia, I'm officially giving you a medal. That's rough. I hope your DH threw you a parade daily for that commitment. That's a ridiculously difficult load to place on one person. DS will sometimes wake 4-5 times per night, by we seem to have hit a phase where he sleeps in 3 hour blocks. It feels heavenly.

My main strategies have been:
- Batch cook on the weekend
- Include DS in activities
- Sleep whenever humanly possible
- Place readings under pillow for subliminal learning (LOL). Seriously, I'm glad I've evolved to need little effort for grad school, because it only gets about 2% of my time. Literally.
- Go to the park daily for PT...DS needs the physical release, plus it's such a wonderfully open-ended activity. We'll easily be there for 2 hours just running and creating imaginary sequences.

I think we're going to start doing scavenger hunts at home, too. We do "I Spy" type games when we go for walks around town, but I'd like to use our own little oasis more creatively. Your DS is a very fortunate boy to have such a playful and interesting Mama. I hope you know that.

These ideas are fun! You're energizing me and rekindling that spirit of play, which is exactly what I needed. I was staring to feel like an adult which, categorically, I am not.

Re: music, I'm proud to say that DS is a rocker like his mother. He also has a taste for metal, which tickles me to no end, but this is softened by his love of Debussy and all things cello. The first video he ever watched was a 40 minute philharmonic performance with close-ups of the different instruments around 9 months, with him shouting out the instrument names. Does your DS play an instrument?

Re: only childhood, I don't think I could bring myself to have another child at least until DS is kindergarten or elementary age. I couldn't take another equally labour intensive child so soon. We deliberately started our family young to buy flexibility down the road. I would love to have another child (or two!) if I could be reasonably assured of my sanity (or maintaining my lack thereof...).

So glad I twisted your arm.

hi aquinas!

i don't know if i have a lot of advice, but i sure do have all the empathy in the world for you.

DD was like this, too - i found the time between 1 and 3 years was the craziest. everything was investigated, and then it was done. my favourite was a maze game that they assured me at the toy store that it was 8+ and included a lot of high-difficulty settings. she literally squealed when she saw it, tweaked the settings for the hardest one, flipped it upside down and solved it backwards in about 10 seconds: she was not yet 3. so... at $2/sec - not the most cost-effective, but i sure learned a lesson about toys!

we lucked into an older peer group in the early years through Montessori and her dance classes - so that has really helped us with the problem of finding proper friends. i really feel your pain on the age-peer front - it can be ok on a superficial level, for limited periods... but not all the time.

i think the best thing we did was to institute some form of "alone time" every day - it was kind of for her benefit, but it was mostly for our sanity. we started slowly (10-15 minutes, ramping it up gradually) and positioned it as "time where no one will tell you what to do" because that was her currency (and still is.) it was quite hard to get going, especially because she was so little at the time and we had to know she was going to be safe. we had major resistance at first, but in the end it gave everyone a proper break. there's been a nice byproduct, too - it has lengthened her attention span (to literally about 9 hours, if left to her own devices - so now at 5 she can mind herself the entire day if i don't suggest an activity change.)

but i have to say the biggest benefit is that it has given her the time to think freely - which must be so great for a kid who used to be so incredibly angry all the time.

ha - and we never did have a second kid. honestly, i am too tired from this one - and man, it was a relief to know that's a real hazard of this kind of child. for YEARS i thought i was just a giant wimp.

Anyone that thinks that a parent with this kind of kid is a "wimp" for quailing visibly at the thought of adding a newborn to the mix...


hasn't lived with one of these human Tsunamis.

I'm laughing out loud at the $2 per-second toy cost. Oh my. YES.

I'm also nodding at "alone time." We childproofed several areas of the house as well as humanly possible so that this was feasible.

Don't be too surprised when schooling-- even with acceleration, even with GT differentiation, even with all of the other tricks that you can muster-- is a ROUGH, ROUGH road with one of these kids. They are all about mastery and full immersion, and they don't tolerate fools, low-level or repetitive information, or drill well. At all. They want to master and then check it off of some life-list or something. My personal hypothesis when DD was about four was that she was actually an alien who was touring the planet and wanted to pack as much in as possible. This helped me to mentally manage my expectations when she would do the $2/second thing-- and she did. (And how)

The other problem with the longer attention span thing (and this might be advice, and maybe not, because truthfully I'm not sure that I could have survived the alternative)--

if they go into a schooling environment with a 1-3hr attention span (or, heaven help you-- LONGER), this is going to be a huge problem. Schools are set up for 10-minute 'activity' times for kids 4-6yo. Period. Even those things supposedly intended for HG children, it's seldom any better than a 30-40 min stretch, and then it's "stop, do something else, now let's do this different thing instead..."

Which drives kids like this berserk. Just noting that.

someday, HK i will find a post of yours that i don't want to just quote in its entirety.

so YES and double YES on the rough road in school. 1 year was enough for us - the kid literally did go berserk. mercifully, we are beginning homeschooling in the fall to save everyone's sanity - but... ha - now, the evil part of me wishes (not really) that i was sending her back there in september - just to see them try to deal with that 9-hour attention span they said wasn't possible. nothing like summer vacation to give a kid a sense of (intellectual) freedom!

Mana, doubtfulguest, HK, you ladies are terrific. Full stop. Thank you so much for joining the conversation. I truly respect your parenting wisdom and warnings.

During DS' first year, I literally began questioning my own sanity. Nobody but my husband, pediatrician (thank God), and parents believed any of DS' early milestones. Comversations with outsiders began to feel very...ontological. Now DS' traits are so undeniable that only a fool could doubt him. (I can feel you nodding in the future based on your experiences.) The first time he spoke up in his angelic voice, he was 5 months old, and it was "I love you too, read book". Even then, he knew how to get what he wanted...

@Doubtfulguest: the commiseration is just as valuable as the advice, so thank you for sharing your experience. The $2/second heuristic sounds about right, though I cringe at the thought. DS is like a Venus fly trap; one hint of a new morsel of brain candy and he launches his whole body into devouring it whole. I've all but given up on buying books, too, unless they're 25-cent retired library copies. We just finished reading Steig's "Dr. De Soto Goes to Africa" which, last week, seemed too complex a storyline. As was true in your family's case, the only constant is change.

I never thought I'd find myself doing this, but I'm trying to rally some good educational resources to formulate some scenarios once DS becomes school-age. We're a long way off, and I hesitate to become to mentally attached to any one option, but I'm seriously considering starting a private HG+ elementary school with ability-based cohort assignmet. (I know DS is waaaay too young to be tested, but he's tracking a solid Ruf 4+, so I'd bet good money he's HG at a minimum. Both his parents are.)

DH and I both have business backgrounds, and I'm formulating some contacts on the gifted educator side of the equation. We're also located minutes away from a world-renowned university in a province that woefully under services HG+ gifted children. So I'm embarking on this journey hopeful that I can build a dynamic, adaptve learning environment that's designed to roll with the punches dished out by kids like DS, something along the lines of a Canadian Davidson.

If that's not a tall order, I don't know what is!

HK - Ahahahaha.... yes... I heard "DS has trouble with transitions" sooooooo many frigging times.

Have you tried Set? If not, I'd definitely give that a whirl with her.

The alien bit was how I used to describe DD to DW :-)

Yup. 18-24 months was the most trying time for me. DD needed constant interaction. I think I realized that in order to keep my sanity I needed to re-focus my efforts on childproofing the whole house and creating spaces where she could be independent. I wanted to create an independent learner. And, little kids learn by playing.

She had an area for creative play with blocks, wooden animals, and little people, a reading area, a kitchen, and an art table that was always fully stocked. And, I always kept a new project on the dining room table (usually a learning manipulative.) We pared down on toys, and went completely screen free (This works! It is not as simple as this, but simplicity goes a long way in creating a calm environment for kids.) The bed was for snuggling and telling stories, and we did that a lot. And, I had a chair that when sitting in I would read to her nonstop. But, other than that she quickly learned that I was doing my own thing at home. I would set things up, but that was it.

I did do a lot of research on how to set up the spaces and what toys I wanted for her. We invested in quality, open-ended toys, that she would grow up with--hundreds of dollars worth of blocks, 50 or so wooden animals, Fagus trucks, over a hundred magna tiles, a large set of keva planks, beautiful silks, wooden peg people, NiC modular home set, a large enamel tea seat--She has had most of these items for years, some for fours years. We love her toys.

We also spent a lot of time out of the house. In the car she had my full attention, and we played word games. And, we usually visited two museums a week and did kids programming out and about, where again she got my full attention.

I know that by 2.5 she was playing by herself for a good two hours by herself. She now can entertain herself all day. She reads to herself for hours a day, creates these fantastic play scapes and has a huge imagination.

Just getting caught up on this thread and it is amazing to me how many of the suggestions I've tried myself these past few years... and, yes, I'll weigh in as one more and validate that you are not alone -- as you already know! Parenting HG+ kiddos has been exhausting for me! Before I realized that ours are a bit more intense than many of our friends' little ones, I was always stunned. The questions our kiddos are asking are simply more exhaustive... and, thus, exhausting.

We had both the saxoflute and the water flutes and those were huge hits! (Pretty much anything with music is around here, though!) So, lots of singing, dancing... family band is a huge hit... and, as was mentioned by someone, the Dr. Seuss books just lend themselves to singing!

A huge hit for almost 3y.o. is "baking" with colored water. She gets bowls full of different colors of water and tsps, tbsps and cup measures to create with. if needed, I can quickly print out recipes, e.g. 22 tsps "blueberries", 3/4 rose water, etc. She LOVES the counting and measuring!

They've all loved creating the backdrops for stickers, since they get frustrated with the lack of detail in their own sketches at that age. A favorite was creating "habitats" for each animal and adding in animal stickers.

Hmm, when ds6 was about 3.5, i'd give him a cookbook and ask him to select something for snack. He would read dozens of recipes aloud (while i did whatever) before making his selection, which was a life saver! Literally, sometimes he'd read them for almost two hours, providing quite a nice mental break for me.

Hmm, I suppose once DS (PG) could read to himself, things did become a bit easier on me, provided I kept him stocked with non-fiction! (Hang in there!)

Lastly, I'll add that we had our three kids very close together and while I find parenting them to be exhausting, they have way more fun together than they do with any of their other playmates. It has been a blessing that they can keep up with one another!

Oh, and I love your ideas for your school. Can we sign up?