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Nodding vigorously. I think I did that in my first post in this thread too, despite feeling so at home here. I have this insane need to be absolutely accurate so if DS8 displayed one MG profile in a subject and HG+ or PG every other time in the same subject, I resort to using the MG profile to describe his abilities in that subject. I don't know why I do this. I feel like I'd be an impostor or fraud if I claimed he was PG when he obviously couldn't answer a simple question to the level I feel a PG child should.

Anyway, I guess I could start a different thread for this but this thread feels appropriate...I wanted to share that today I had to drink 3 mugs of coffee to keep up with the kid. I usually drink only one and two on the days that I'm exhausted. Today in rapid fire over the course of 5 hours he came up with all sorts of projects he wants to do and puzzles he wants to solve and a presentation he wants to give. I'm brain dead with trying to keep an interested face to listen to him and give him feedback and just keep up with him. I often wonder how people handle 2 or 3 HG+ extremely verbal kids in the same family...how do you manage to survive? How do you sleep at night? I can't ignore DS, my conscience won't allow me to but at the same time, I'm really at my wit's end. I just wish his brain will slow down sometimes or he'll just keep quiet.

On another note, we have an opportunity to have him assessed with the Wisc for a very affordable fee. This is a qualified psych with some years of experience so I'm not too worried about credentials. We have put off testing all this while due to cost and a few other factors but this opportunity seems too good to pass up. I'm suddenly terrified though. What if he's nowhere near HG? What if I've been imagining it all this while? It eventually won't matter, I know that. But I have this momentary fear that everything I thought was true about him all these years will suddenly vanish. And I'll have to figure him out all over again.

Thank you for letting me rant. I gave him free rein of our audio system for him to play his fave music while I write this. Otherwise I couldn't have 2 minutes silence from him to write. Yes, even loud music is easier for me to focus with than DS' constant, incessant outpouring of ideas. Gosh I must sound like a horrible mom lol. This is extremely unlike me. I'm normally sane and calm and very tight-lipped about him even among close friends. I think it's the combo of coffee plus feeling really really comfortable in this forum.

I have spent some time looking at the Ruf levels over the last few weeks and am completely stumped as to what to make of my kids.


I was really surprised to read this as I have been mulling over the last line of each level saying "there are x number of children like this in an average class/school".

That's level 3, and by percentiles that would make level 3s 98-99%.

That's level 4, by percentiles level 4 kids would be 99.5%.

I would have thought HG was around Lvl4 and PG lvl5?

I would say, apart from the reading, that both of my older girls are absolutely Lvl 3 and probably lvl 4 based on description. DD1s scores are certainly not Lvl 3, she's 2E though so I am hoping that retesting with someone looking for that might be more illuminating (and I have asked for her subtest scores, which I have not seen). DD2s WPPSI scores are in the range, so that makes sense.

But even so I find it really hard to get my head around the idea that she's that gifted because she just seems so "normal" to me, and apparently she seems pretty damn normal to her preschool too...

Ah yeah, I am just realising WHY I find it so freaking hard to keep our life together, why I am always utterly exhausted, sleep deprived and frazzled - and LATE to everything when I used to always be so organised and on time. I too wonder if other parents of multiple gifted kids cope better than we do, but I regularly feel like my head is going to explode with all three of them going full pelt all the time. Particularly given the strong visual spatial leanings in the family ("Shoe's? Huh? Where?.... Lunch? Drink bottle?... I don't know what I did with them... Look at this cool thing I made..." x 3 kids and one DH).

Flower, my DD didn't teach herself to read, either. She learned when we finally broke down/gave in and taught her some simple phonetic decoding methods at just over age 4.

The thing is, the jump that she made at that point was so incredibly mind-boggling that it really makes other adults think we're making it up. She literally went from Bob books to Harry Potter in a matter of months. And I don't mean struggling her way through sounding out Harry Potter-- I mean silent, sustained reading on the sly and with startling rapidity.

It's those quantum leaps that seem to have defined her developmentally from day one. So Ruf4. She can't-can't-can't-can't....then *bam* (no practice, no additional instruction, I mean) MASTERY/nearly perfect fluency. It's as if once she sees how-- she just knows how to do something at a zen master level or something. Practice is completely irrelevant.

The way a lot of ND kids learn to ride a bicycle or tie their shoes, I think. Well, maybe not. Because I think there is usually a lot of coaching and demonstration there, and DD really doesn't tolerate much of that.

I've only had that experience a few times in my life. One was this odd thing where I suddenly just knew how to French braid my own hair when I was about 11. Nobody had ever shown me, I'd never seen it done, and I was working entirely by feel... but I could just see in my head how it had to work, YK?

I also think that this MB, like another that I'm a member of, tends to skew toward people that most need the connection with other parents in similar straits. So yes, more "severely" affected kids. Greater LOG probably means more impact on families and on parenting. Parenting books exist for parenting OG kids. Once you have an HG+ kid, though, you really do have a lot of questions about development that no experts seem to have answers for. "Is this normal" becomes... "Is this something worrying in the context of MY child?" and the answer isn't always clear.

Ergo-- here I am. Is it "normal" for a high school student to need reminding to brush her teeth? Well, no. But maybe yes, if that high schooler is also a hormonal 11 yo that is REALLY not a morning person.



Why does THAT thought sound so familiar??

DD1, my 2E girl, is very like this, though her leaps aren't quite so extreme. She was middling along on the piano making SLOW progress, then one morning came out and saw the piece DH was playing still on the piano (not hugely advanced but way above her "level"), and decided to have a crack at it. And off she went... She started yr2 unable to read and ended at roughly end of yr1 level, which was good steady progress, but first week of yr3 the librarian told her she had to take novels home now, so being a fairly compliant girl (at school) she did, and after a few minor teething problems her reading level leapt ahead.

It's frustrating to know how laborious sequential learning is for her and how stunning her leaps can be, but to also to understand that the leap has to come by accident it seems. It can't be pushed, or rather we haven't yet figured out how to deliberately push that gestalt in her understanding.

My 2E-DS fits the Ruf Level 4 profile in the domain that is not impacted by his disabilities, and has HG/PG IQ and achievement scores in that area as well.

It is incredibly cool to be able to hang out with other parents in a place where both my kid and my parenting concerns (even with the 2E stuff) are seen as pretty typical - this almost never happens for me anywhere else.

Oh YES! Me too. Hence why I am flipping out so much about having a third!

Anyway, my children haven't been tested (one is too young, one borderline) but we haven't needed to for school or anything. So sometimes, yes, I convince myself I am making it all up. But that is all in my head, no-one here has ever implied I shouldn't be here. It is the fact that I can say "Help, my four year old needs structured learning activities, what do I do?" and I don't get the usual comments about how awful I am to try to force structured learning on my child and I should just let him play in the yard, or how I have been brainwashed by all those early learning programmes. People here get it! I feel comfortable here, so I stay.

But I also think there is the self selection factor - that the more 'different' a child is, the more likely parents are to seek help and support and not find that locally and so go for forums such as this. So it wouldn't surprise me if the demographics were a bit skewed that way.

Now, that would work with dd12 being a level 4. She was quite different from the typical classmates and needed special arrangements (grade skipping + accelerated classes despite being the youngest in the grade pre-skip). Those arrangements have made her fit right into the middle of the pack of the accelerated math class and still left her at the top of the pack in the accelerated literacy class, but subject acceleration isn't a possibility in middle school literacy.

I'm not sure on 99.5 but I suppose she could fit there. We have plenty of acheivement scores that are in that range and her IQ, with the extended scoring, comes out somewhere around the 99th or a hair above. She's only been IQ tested once, at age 7.4, and it wasn't the ideal time for testing given some anxiety issues, so I suppose that I can't put total stock in it being the be-all-end-all of her ability, but I still have no reason to believe that she's DYS level.

I'd agree w/ others, though, that this board has been the best fit for me in terms of being able to openly dicuss dd12. It feels like a fit even if she isn't as high up as many of the other kids. The combo of being HG and being so centered and directed on what she wants to do with her life make her a force to be reckoned with !

This is us! We only had DD8.5 tested because we thought she had a learning disability! We knew about the ADHD, but things just didn't make sense. She was disengaged at school and writing was a huge struggle for her. We were BLOWN AWAY when we got the testing results back. It has been over a year now and I am still in gifted denial. She just does not present like a gifted child.... completely underground, as someone else said in another thread. She fits in perfectly with her class and her friends and everyone who knows her was as shocked as we were. She is happy to do minimal work. She prefers gym class and recess to all other subjects, oh, and reading! She is HG+/PG but being 2e with ADHD and crippling perfectionism, she has a really hard time at school. Her achievement tests were mostly average (except reading and math reasoning). Try to talk to her about math and she shuts down. She hates it because sometimes she makes mistakes and that is unacceptable to her, so she plays dumb and refuses to try. Her recent report card: 3 A's and the rest B's. The kid got a B in reading!! She read Anne of Green Gables this year and is now reading Little Women and The Secret Garden at home (grade three). At school, she reads the easy books because they are there. When she has to do reading comprehension exercises, she writes as little as possible. When she is asked verbally about books she has read in class, she is so bored by them that she responds with vague answers that make the teacher think she didn't understand what she read.

I have looked over the Ruf levels several times and I believe that this played into my initial gifted denial. DD does not fit into a single category. She is the most reluctant smart child you will ever come across. She knows a hell of a lot about things she is interested in (right now it is the Jewish religion and the Canadian government system), but as soon as her burning questions are answered she does not wish to talk about it again. Just stores the information. Our poor priest doesn't know what to think of her. She often corners him or emails him with the deep theological questions she stays up at night wondering about. I am slowly coming to the conclusion that school will NEVER begin to meet her needs. She just does not learn the same way as other children.


I moved up to three cups of coffee daily after my second began to move around. With my first, I honestly thought that there was something wrong with me as a parent. No one else had a child like mine. Whenever I bemoaned how exhausting she was I would get the 'look' from other parents or an eye roll, as if I was just exaggerating. We could not go to church with her, or a restaurant, or many public places. She was a vibrating ball of energy that could not be stilled. And SHE NEVER STOPPED TALKING (okay, that was after she finally DID start talking at 3.5... careful what you wish for). For a while, we just thought we had gotten a defective model child. There was no recognition that she was GT. We just thought she was crazy. Our little guy, 2.5, is doing things that far surpass his sister. There is no way that he has ADHD. It scares me to think about having a child with his sister's IQ and the ability to channel it. He frightens me sometimes and I find it very overwhelming to think about how to parent him. At least he stays still. I just need the extra coffee to keep up with his sister!

I really enjoyed reading the posts in this thread. I have said before that this site is my lifeline to sanity. I can talk about my kids and have people understand. I can talk about parenting concerns and not be dismissed. Here, people understand why I want to fight so hard for DD. IRL, people think we should just be happy that she is smart but seemingly okay in her class. They don't get that she is slowly being suffocated intellectually and burying herself and her abilities so that she can continue to fit in.

kathleen'smum, that is a pretty spot on descriptor of my dd10 as well. It's taken a ton of advocacy to get her anything other than avg grouping with no differentiation in school. She just took the high stakes test that determines if she can continue to subject accelerate in math next year in middle school so we're hoping that her streak of As in math as of late holds out.

It is hard to get anyone, and even oneself at time, to believe that a child who looks bright-average often is actually HG and has a disability.