Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion You know you're parenting a gifted child when...

When your child loses their glasses and you have spent months looking for them and then finally just buy her knew ones. Which she forgets to wear because she got used to not wearing glasses. Then one day she says, "Hey mom, found my old glasses!"
Come to find out she put them in her telescope case when she was looking through her telescope.

Also she helps me list books on my online bookstore, trying to start a used bookstore. She corrects my mistakes in the condition comments. My fingers type faster than my brain works. She stops and actually reads it and fixes it. Thank goodness for a super smart kid, who will probably be my business partner when she's old enough...LOL

DS3.5 loves to express his intentions in double negatives lately. For instance, "I will not not fall asleep." It's a cute insight into his internal process of reconciling his wishes with mine.

aquinas - your first story reminded me of our family's "opposite-bot" game which was started around that age and the kids still love to do.

An opposite-bot is a robot that does the exact opposite of what you tell it to do. In our house it generally ends up in loops like this -
In your best robotic voice - "I am an opposite-bot"
"If you are an opposite-bot and you say that you are an opposite-bot then that means the opposite so you are not an opposite-bot but if you aren't an opposite-bot and you say that you are then that means you are...." and so on.

I recall some odd looks when the game devolved to this in the checkout lane and the kids were 4 and 2....

Ha - my kids are always telling me "It's not opposite day!"...
which of course means it is opposite day - or does it?

They just love to confuse me generally...

When you're reading and discussing Shakespeare with your newly-turned eight year old but your four year old (whom you've previously considered weaker on language arts) keeps piping up with relevant questions, and ends the day saying he hopes we can read Romeo and Juliet again. (We offered him a comedy next though.)

ha! That is too funny!

... your child uses the computer unattended, then later when you worriedly check browsing history you find a search on "inner workings of particle accelerators".

You show your ten-year-old a pattern in the sequence of squared numbers, and she picks up your pen and immediately finds a non-obvious pattern in the sequence of cubed numbers.

Wow.

That's really neat, Val. I bet that would have been something to witness!

Has the pattern got anything to do with the sum of the digits, 8,9,10...? If not, I would love to learn the pattern.