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

the decorative painting on your mother's day gift has both π and τ in the design.... (DS is almost 9)

Your not-quite-16yo forgets to print an important portion of an assignment (thereby losing the points for it in one of her classes, and earning a B rather than an A on something which is a significant portion of the class grade). Oh, and then attempts to lie to us about the discovery of this particular problem (she leaves paper everywhere and I saw the cover sheet with the remark on it that it was MISSING)... and


AND

The following day, that same child learns that the "scary" professor (the one that terrifies the other majors with her intensity and-- em-- sharpness-- but has a mutual fanclub thing going on with my DD) has hand-picked her to be assistant director next fall (when she will be just 16yo) in one of the university's 3 major productions for the next year. For a VERY well-known Shakespeare play. Because she has "vision" and a big-picture understanding in a way that most undergraduates do not, apparently. Why yes, this professor does know about Hamlet, the musical tragi-comedy.



I can't decide if we should treat her as though she is four.... or twenty-four. Asynchrony, they name is {Insert DD Name Here}.

Awesome! Good for your dd--what an experience that will be!

The other day, when saying goodbye to our friends, my DS5 exclaimed, "there are four of us, so we can give one another twenty-four different combinations of hugs!"

Leo's-- Oh, wow!

And HK--how frustrating and exciting!

When reprimanded for telling me to "shut up" this morning (thank you, DH, for not reading our expurgated version of "Berenstain Bears get in a Fight"), DS3.5 says, "I'm sorry Mama. I think my blood sugar is low and I need to eat."

And then there was the post-11:00pm bedtime debate DH and DS had last night about the line "rain rain, go away, come again some other day" from a children's song, but with time replacing rain. (I'll admit that we have a problem of bedtime obstinacy, which we've solved, for now, by anthropomorphising time and casting it as a villain that tries to trick you into letting it sneak away with opportunities for fun by wasting your life dawdling. So far, so good.) DS was adamant that the sudden absence of time in the new version of the song, and its return after a sufficiently long interval that would have otherwise elapsed absent time's ceasing to exist, required the start of a new day. DH kissed DS goodnight and said, "tomorrow I'm going to introduce you to a man named Mr. Einstein who might have a few things to say about time." DS quips, "Another day, eh?" {Facepalm}

This isn't very surprising. I often got the impression reading your posts that your DD's heart was in theater.

When your 5 year old emergent reader is sitting next to you classifying her animal trading cards into various subgroups for fun leans over and says, so did you just type **************? And cracks up laughing, she is soooo busted. I'm a 80 wpm typist and had a toddler obscuring some of her view. She's now watching Sesame Street online while I change all our passwords.

So we're eating lunch in a restaurant with our 15 yo twins, having an long and animated discussion about possible causes of the unusual seasonal cycles in Westeros (Game of Thrones). The discussion gets a bit heated when it digressed into the effect of the moon on the tilt of the earth's axis.

As we were leaving the restaurant, a woman eating by herself two tables down pulled me aside and said, "I overheard your conversation and I am a retired gifted teacher -- I sure hope those kids go to a good school!"

I had a reality check on how non-normative our family's experience was today when I realized DS3.5's association with the name Nemo isn't an animated fish, but rather the captain of the Nautilis from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Aside/tip: This book is great read-aloud fodder for this age!

Aside 2: I'm grateful that DS enjoys good literature. Given the volume of books read each day, it's good for my sanity that our material be writing I enjoy, too! He's been begging to read the original Frankenstein, but I think we'll have to hold off there for now.