Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The first thing.....What was it?

I have two things ---

First, when DD was in the nursery as a newborn the nurses kept commenting on how when she woke up she never cried. All the other babies cried. But when DD woke up from "napping" she would would open her eyes real wide and simply look around.

But the biggest think I notice was when DD was 5 months old. We were in an airport waiting to board the plane. We had a blanked on her in her stroller and she pulled the blanket over her head. We thought it was cute and said "Where's DD???" and then she pulled it down and giggled. I put the blanket over her head again myself and did it again. Then she started pulling it over her head her self and so on....We couldn't believe she knew how to play peek a boo at 5 months! We took video of it later that week when we were home.

AWWW!!

Mr W started doing that early, too. I used to put him in his boppy seat on the counter when he could barely sit up - while I made meals and he would just sort of sit in it and watch me.

One day I put a rag over his head and asked, "Where's Mr W?" and he pulled the rag off, laughed real hard, then held the rag out to me. We did this for a good 20 minutes. I then put it on my head and asked, "Where's daddy?" and he pulled it off, laughing hard.

I then put one on him and one on me and he pulled his off and then mine. It was great fun!!

This evening DW and him were playing with a ball. Dw would throw it, Mr W would get it, throw it back. He got bored and did something else -

"Gee, honey, you've taught him to fetch." You see, Mr W would go get the ball, put it in his mouth, and walk back..

With our first she slept all of the time. We were living in Japan at the time and the nurses in the hospital got really mad at me because I wouldn't wake up in the night to nurse. Well, why would I wake up - she was sleeping through the night! (Yes, she stayed sleeping through the night, it wasn't a fluke thing.) And she also took 2 2-3 hour naps a day! But, when she was awake she was always very observant and loved to interact with anyone who would look at her. She is still, at age 6 one of the most outgoing and friendly kids I know.

Austin ... that is so cute! We use our DD to fetch the tennis ball for our dogs since that idea escapes them. And yes they are golden retrievers. So our running joke is that we had our DD to fetch the balls for our retrievers. Of course the putting it in her mouth to carry it back is frowned upon. The balls are disgusting to say the least!

Quite interesting, this is a really fun thread to read...I would say the first thing is that he didn't sleep and seemed bored...like he didn't know what to do. The second was that he didn't put things in his mouth. Also very early he LOVED books, would crawl and find the ones he wanted to look at and sit and turn pages even by himself. And the biggest earliest thing that confused me was when he would match letters of the alphabet with other alphabet shapes and crawl around with pairs: P and D, L and T, W and M, O and Q, B and R, A and V, Z and N. It was quite interesting how he would only choose those pairs. It took me a while to realize there was a pattern based on shape. This was way early, when he was like 10 months old. Anyhow, those were pretty good cues something is up.

DS5 picked his head up between 45 - 90 degrees while on his stomach before he was 4 weeks old. And I could hold him without holding his head as a newborn... he'd lock his legs and "stand" on my legs, like a 2 or 3 month old might do. Like Erica's DS, he was completely engaged from day 1.

One of the things that I remember most was talking with a friend about her DD, who is a few months older than DS5. We were discussing the ABCs. And she said how her DD could sing the song, but could only recognize about 4 of the letters. I explained to her that DS5, then 4 months younger than her DD, knew all of his letters and recogniced them before he knew the ABC song. She didn't understand what I meant, and I explained that he recognized all his capital letters before he learned the song.

And he was through with Sesame Street by age 1.