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Support for Parents of Gifted Children, #3

post #1 of 366
Thread Starter 
Just starting a new thread since several people have asked for one over the past couple weeks. I guess 26 pages is long enough. :LOL

Hope it's okay, eilonwy.
post #2 of 366
Thread Starter 

So, what are your kids up to right now? Hollis (9) is doing algebra, geometry, Latin, Japanese, chemistry, and now is asking me to find him stuff about genetics. He says he wants to be a baseball player and a genetics researcher when he grows up but that he's "not sure how the schedules will work together." Hehehe. Sorry, that cracks me up.

Nan (6) has just recently learned to read. Funny how she went from not being able to sound out "it" to a week later being able to read whole easy readers by herself. Methinks the lass was engaging in some trickery. She stopped drawing Powerpuff Girls incessantly and lately has been trying to copy the dolls out of the American Girls catalog instead. And cats. She keeps drawing cats.

Let's have some brags to get the new thread started.
post #3 of 366

Not a brag but a question

I've recently noticed very different drawing styles between #1 and #2 (at the same age - 2.5). #2 is obsessed with faces, all kinds of faces. She draws 2 circles for eyes, sometimes a nose, a mouth (sometimes with teeth), a big circle for a face. She sometimes goes over her lines once or more. Sometimes she draws dresses or hair or crowns or shoes or whatever. But generally, it's pretty conventional. There's a round face, identifiable features. Standard drawing. #1, at the same age, didn't draw like that at all. She was really abstract. Sometimes she would just draw some weird shapes and call it her. Sometimes she would tell us that what we're seeing are eyelashes (but no eyes), belly button and umbilical cord (but no arms or legs). You know, just really strange representations of herself and others (people and objects).

My concern is that lately we've been watching quite a bit of TV. #1 did not watch so much, and certainly not cartoons. I'm wondering how much of #2's style of drawing is influenced by the images she's received about what a drawing is supposed to look like. I don't have a judgement about it, I just wonder. It would affect how I might proceed with cutting TV out of our lives again. Have you observed similar things? Or just the opposite?

post #4 of 366
Originally Posted by lckrause

Hope it's okay, eilonwy.
It's all good to me! It's just that of my half dozen odd "regular" threads, I've started the most recent threads of 5 of them; I spent a bit of time encouraging others to do it for the new year, and even posted linking instructions for the old threads. :LOL And I haven't started any of the newest threads.

BeanBean is 26 months old now and doing some pretty cool stuff. He's really interested in percentages (I think Mike taught him the % sign), and knows that 100% means something is finished/whole/complete, and that 50% means it's not. He's been playing with words a lot, and tells me all about nouns ("ChibiChibi is a noun, television is a noun, BeanBean is a noun, mamma is a noun, a noun is the name of a person, place, thing, idea!").

He's been drawing a lot with his cousin. She draws people and flowers and houses and trees, and he draws triangles and lines and circles. He doesn't make a scribble and say "this is mamma" but he does scribble a bit and then say "Mamma, I made this for you. See here? It's a triangle! And this is a mess!" :LOL It's adorable, really. He's completely obsessed with triangles. I understand; I was too at his age. He knows circle, square, rectangle, octagon, hexagon and star as well (occasionally squares and rectangles get mixed up) but the triangle holds a special place in his little heart. :LOL

We're still fighting sleep issues (it's 2:40 AM; he went to sleep less than half an hour ago), especially because when he wants to be awake, he tends to make noise and kick his sister. Tonight, we're at the IL's again; he's got lots of very loud toys here. He turned off his Boom Box because "It's too loud for BooBah. She's sleeping. Shhhhhh." So he is trying, and he's learning compassion, sharing, and all sorts of social things. I'm much more impressed by that than any of the "academic" things he does, but all anyone else can talk about is how well he speaks of late. I think it's much more noteworthy that he understands that when someone is scared or upset, they need a hug and that when his sister's asleep she needs quiet. And yesterday, when Mike came home from work, BeanBean wrapped his arms around his neck and said "I missed you, daddy. I love you so much!" He likes to play with names, too; "Mamma loves BooBah. BooBah loves Mamma. BooBah loves Eli. Eli loves Daddy." He'll do this for half an hour, with his cousins' and aunts' and grandparents' names. :LOL

Miss BooBah is 6.5 months old and has been crawling long enough that she fears edges now and will not tumble off the edge of a bed or anything else while she's awake; instead, she'll shriek for attention. Next step: Learning to turn around and slide off legs first. She's actually done it a few times, but I'm not certain that it's deliberate at this point. She's been saying "I love you" a lot, she's blowing fewer raspberries than she was and babbling a lot more, with actual words thrown in for good measure. BooBah calls her brother by name and calls her cousin the same thing every time but it sounds nothing like her name... She also says "mamma," "dadda," "hi," "yeah," and "keeee paaa" (clean pants! :LOL) and is still thrilled beyond reason when people understand her. She's definately gaining weight, and vomiting much less since she started taking Pepcid and eating rice cereal. I'd like to start her on some veggies, but I'm hesitant because veggies can cause gas (even the pureed ones) and I don't want her to associate any more pain with eating. So I'm holding off for a little while longer.

I'm still a little concerned about BooBah "passing" BeanBean, but less than I was now that he's really talking and taking off. He had more actual words than she does, but she communicates more effectively with other people than he did. It's difficult to explain, and I don't know if it's actually her or just that she's a girl and people are more likely to assume that a girl is expressing herself than a boy...? Then again, she wears more boy clothes than girl clothes. I don't know. At any rate, they love each other dearly, and that's a huge step in the right direction as far as I'm concerned.
post #5 of 366
Yup, 26 pages was too long!!!

My daughter is currently in kindergarten and reading what I would call early chapter books - Amber Brown Is Not A Crayon is the one she's reading now. Her decoding skills are pretty good but I've noticed that these days she is just using context clues to figure out words that might stump her if they were shown to her on a list. She gets them immediately, though, without any discernable break in the flow of her reading. It's really weird, because she'll read a word like "Inappropriately" and then miss a much easier, shorter word. She tends to read very fast and skip over small words such as "that," "then," or "and." This is why i like to ask her to read aloud to me a little bit almost every day. Although, even with the careless errors she makes, she can comprehend things just fine - she'll silently read an article about whales in Ranger Rick magazine and tell me all about what she learned with no problem.

I'm starting to wonder if I should start doing math with her. The "math" they do in school is very, very basic so far and I know she is capable of more and would enjoy it. I figure that math is something that requires more direct instruction than reading, because doing paper-and-pencil math is not part of a six-year-old's daily life the way books are (at least in a literate family - sadly I see way too many kids who do not get read to or taken to the library at all. ). Part of me wonders if going out and getting a math workbook is a bad idea - does it make me a "pushy" parent? I just keep thinking of the cheetah in the cage.

And that brings me to the fact that this coming week I will be meeting with her teacher and her "enrichment" teacher to discuss my concern that 99% of the work she does at school is just busywork for her, and that I'm worried that if she is not challenged she will develop the same lax attitude towards schoolwork that I did as a child. That attitude got me into trouble when i applied to and was accepted at a high school for gifted students and suddenly the work was harder and I had no idea how to study. I know she's only in kindergarten and maybe I should sit tight till first grade, but I do want to just bring up my concerns. I feel pressured to do a lot of stuff with her at home to keep her stimulated intellectually and I would like them to maybe pick up some of that - I mean, the kid's in school six hours a day five days a week, and I want her to just have the rest of her time to play! I don't want to make her spend more time doing "school stuff," KWIM? She's six! It might be as simple as asking the teacher to give her harder worksheets for homework. We'll see what happens.

Anyway, sorry if I was long winded - this new thread caught me at a time that my daughter's education is really weighing on my mind. I'm glad to have found this group here!!! I love reading about everyone else's kids!
post #6 of 366
Thread Starter 
Hey Lunamom, have you thought about doing some basic math with legos or blocks? When Hollis was little he loved making patterns and doing adding and subtracting with his duplos. He would make me "quiz" him for like 2 hours at a time. Gee, I don't know why I was exhausted back then. Anyway, just a suggestion to see if she's interested before you spend money on workbooks (which he also loved).
post #7 of 366
darlindeliasmom, unfortunately, a Special Education label such as "learning disabled" requires not only an observable and testable discrepancy in ability vs. achievement, but also that the student is functioning below grade level. Yes, another way in which the schools sometimes shortchange gifted students. So, if you know that your daughter is performing at the same level as the average 4th grader (which is what "at the 4th grade level" translates to) in most areas but not all, the discrepancy between her strong and relatively weak subjects should be enough to indicate a problem, but even her weaknesses put her on par with the average student in her grade, so she is supposedly not struggling in any way that would impact her functioning as a second grader. I know all of this as I have been a 2nd grade public school teacher for 7 years and additionally, I have two siblings who were labeled "gifted" as children. (I happen to have missed the IQ cut off by a couple of points, so I can relate to where you are with your daughter right now!)

I browse in this forum as both an interested educator and the mom of a probably-gifted four year old ds. I also have a 9 month old who's already talking but even more interestingly to me, she has made up a bunch of her own signs (I didn't try to ever teach her any, since i figured ds talked at 6 months and never needed them so she wouldn't either) to communicate everything she needs! Ds's area of giftedness (if, indeed, he is) would be his verbal communication skills, including an extensive vocabulary, and his reasoning ability. He is also incredibly observant, plus he remembers, verbatim, almost everything he hears, including stories word for word after hearning them just one time! And, he remembers them months and months later. He's also just regular "smart" with other things: has learned to read phonetically, can reason out sums and differences, likes to make patterns out of everything.

I enjoy reading the stories others post because I love clever kids and the things they say and do!!
post #8 of 366
Hi. I read the last thread with great interest. I'm not sure if I belong here or not. We've been scratching our heads over ds1 since he was about 12 months. Back then, he was really into matching; he would only carry matching toys. He had been flipping through books on his own since 7 months, but I never thought that was unusual.

At 18 months, a lot of things happened at once. He showed us that he knew letters and numbers by sight. I had inadvertently taught him the letters when he took baths. He didn't speak, the ped was concerned, so I tested him with foam tub letters to see if he could actually make the letter sounds (to see if it was hearing or muscle issues or whatnot). I didn't realize that he memorized them. We could take a Hallmark card, flip over to the back and ask him to point out the, "j" and he would. When he got a box of puzzles for Christmas at 19 months, we learned that he had also learned numbers somehow and most of his shapes. He was a puzzle guy for a really long time. He maxed out at 100 piece puzzles at newly 3, where he lost interest (too many pieces; overwhelming it seemed).

Once he started speaking at 22 months, he caught up with speech very quickly. One day, when he was 2 1/2, he excitedly pulled me into the bedroom, saying, "ah uh zoy! ah uh zoy!". We have an inset bedroom ceiling and there, indeed, trapezoid shapes on each side of the inset rectangle. In the 2s, he knew some sight-words. He was also conspicously different with age-mates, mostly in his extreme caution and introversion. He was never one to run around and make happy noises with the other kids. He was happy, but he would rather watch other children play. That really worried me for a long time.

Now that we're in the 3s, he truly seems like the average boy. He's discovering the joys of jumping and climbing, finally. He doesn't really "wow" us anymore. Sometimes, it happens. One night in art class when he was a couple of months past 3, when the teacher said, "turn over the paper and write your child's name", he wrote his name. We had no idea he could form letters! We ended up pulling him from that class, because, among other things, the teacher called him out for writing, saying he had it "easy" for having a nickname with only three letters. He went through a spurt of copying words from books, but he doesn't do that much anymore.

He does love to draw, although he's winding down from that right now (when something catches his interest, he lives and breathes it). His drawings seemed very detailed: trucks inside trucks inside trucks with pictures of trucks on them. He also copied toys for a while, like would draw a toy in front of him, making a decent-looking replica.

He seems to live in a fantasy world a lot, talking to his toys, talking on behalf of his toys in funny voices, describing detailed events that are happening with the toys...I'm assuming that this is a 3yo thing though.

I don't know. We're homeschooling. He'll never be tested, likely. He doesn't seem gifted to me these days. I once sought out this type of thread or board, because of the sadness and difficulty I had with him being so obviously different. This has not been an easy path for us. He's also very sensitive and that's not easy either, especially with a boy. It's nice to have support or talk to other people who have had some of the same issues as us. I guess I feel like I need to justify my interest in this topic. I'm coming from an angle of finding support for the quirks and stuff. But I'm not sure if he really is gifted. Different, yes. Learning to blend a bit, yes.

I also have a 14 month old. We have no idea about him. He spends a lot of time "reading" right now, making very loud animal sounds as he flips the pages and finds animal pictures. He also likes to hum songs, parts of songs I mean. He doesn't have any quirks that show up right now and I'm more relaxed with this child anyway. I have no idea if he is gifted.

At any rate, that's my background. Whether or not my kids are gifted, this subject interests me. I hope it's Ok if I stick around and read.
post #9 of 366
A conversation with BeanBean:

"Mamma, I want nursies."

"I'd rather not, how about some eggs?"

"I don't want eggs, no thank you. I want nursies."

"How about some cheese?"

"Cheese is yucky, no thank you! I want nursies."

"Would you like some french toast?"

"French toast? That's yucky!! May I please have some nursies?"

"Ask me for anything you like, except for nursies."

"May I please have the other side?" :LOL (Other side meaning, of course, the other breast.)
post #10 of 366
Hi, ladies! I'm subscribing so I can keep up with everyone!

By way of introduction, I have a 7.5 month old who I'm guessing is quite gifted. He's very expressive, has been signing for "mommy-milk" occasionally since he was 3 months and said his first word this week ("mama"). He figures out toys quickly, follows our directions easily, is already playing with shape sorters and learning how to turn pages in books when we read, and is EXTREMELY social/expressive. He also has an long attention span, I guess since I'm not around other babies I didn't realize that was unusual. He'll happily sit and play with a toy for 20-30 minutes on his own, figuring it out, moving it around, exploring it with hands/mouth. DH and I met at a school for the gifted, so everyone is expecting great things of our kids, which sometimes bothers me, but only because I don't want my kids to feel pressured.

My cute story of the week is that my sister (who lives with us) taught Killy to say, "Blub, blub, blub!" which has no meaning but is apparently really fun to say! We were at the library where she works and she was telling some co-workers how she'd taught him to say it and he heard her telling them and popped up right on que with it - everyone just cracked up! He only says Mama when he's upset and I'm not comforting him fast enough, though - not on que. Honestly, I think he's been saying it for awhile, but I was just chalking it up to my imagination - but my sis and DH heard it this time and convinced me it was real!

Edited to add: Okay, apparently he is saying Mama on que! Just now, DH was playing with him on the floor and said, "If you say "mama" she'll come pick you up right now." And DS immediately said it!
post #11 of 366

I know this is a support thread, so I hope you guys don't mind my popping in here to ask a question for a friend of mine (who doesn't have a computer, or she'd be asking it herself!). The other day I told my friend that I think her son is gifted, and she agreed that she's been thinking the same thing, but didn't want to say anything since she didn't want to sound like she was bragging. She's actually pretty embarrassed about it. She's also worried because they were just planning to send him to regular public school, and now she thinks that it won't be a good place for him.

Her son, J. turned two at the end of August. He started talking right around 12 months, but unlike most kids who start with a word or two, he was like just suddenly TALKING. In sentences and everything. He repeated everything, but would also come up with his own things to say. We thought this was pretty remarkable, but not entirely out of the ordinary. What first really struck ME about him, was when he was about 18 months old, and after not seeing him for a few months (winter illnesses) we ran into him and his dad in a store. J. immediately remembered my sons' names and who was who (I have twins, and most adults don't remember who's who). I thought, "wow! He really has quite a memory!" And, again, was blown away by hearing such a tiny person speak in such an adult way. Every word is so clearly pronounced, his mom says he's never said a word incorrectly.

Things really started to seem different this past summer. J. and his family moved into a new house that is adjacent to an elementary school. In the school playground, there is a huge map of the US painted on the cement, with all of the states and capitals labeled. J. got a huge kick out of running from state to state and asking where he was standing, and then announcing "I'm in Texas!" or whatever. A couple of weeks after they had started playing at the playground, J. started randomly telling people the names of the states and their capitals. It turned out that he knew them all. Just after he turned two, his parents showed him a blank map of the US just for fun, and realized that he could point to each state by name and say its capital. These are things his parents do not have memorized, so they were totally blown away. Then, one day, J. pointed to a puddle on the ground and said, "that puddle looks like Florida." It did! J's parents realized that he could recognize the outlines of all of the states too. At this point, J. became obsessed with the atlas, and now knows all of the countries by name, location, and shape. I cannot imagine knowing all that stuff myself!

Obviously, this is a gifted child, right? The question J's mom has is if there is anything she should be doing other than just caring for him as she would any two-year-old boy. Also, she wonders if she should have him tested for autism. She only knew of autistic people having this sort of memory. J. doesn't strike me as autistic at all, but I am not an expert. The only thing that I would say seems a little "off" socially is that sometimes he does speak in a kind of a monotone, so very clearly pronouncing each word.

Thanks so much for any replies!

post #12 of 366
My little Sophia is 18 mos...and cute as a button...

She is talking quite well...really seems to be having a language burst...nice little sentences..she knows her colors, shapes, most of the alphabet and some numbers. She points to words as we are reading..she is fascinated by words...all pretty cool but not the thing that amazes me the most.

She is absolutely amazing to watch...she will take puppets and stuffed toys and create a whole little imagination world...they will all talk, pretty much different voices...they dance with each other, kiss each other, hug each other...she does the voices...some of the language is real..some is gibberish...usually I can tell if a puppet is upset...she will have a puppet cry then have another puppet console it...it's absolutely unbelievable to watch...she has been doing this since around a year but it's just getting more and more complex as she gets older...

She will also play with her baby doll, fake food and dishes...

I notice she will also make her own decisions...take things on her own to the garbage...then realise she forgot to close the door...go "oh, door" and turn around and go back and close it...geez...can she teach my 14 year old to do this now

Anyway...instinct tells me she's gifted and instinct doesn't usually fail me much...

I love reading about your children...thanks for sharing!
post #13 of 366
lex- I don't really know much about autism, but he sounds gifted to me. Kids are interested in different things. My daughter could care less about numbers, for example, she likes counting but adding and subtracting are not her bag. I hated it too as a kid.

She loves letters and animals, though! She will be two on the 20th and is starting to form words including "MOM" "DYLAN" "CAT" "DOG" "ANDIE" and "FISH".

Which reminds me. We have only showed her capital letters, should we stick with that for a while or introduce lower case as well?

As far as animals goes she knows them all! She will tell you classifications also. Like

"All the primates in the world!"

"What Dylan?"

"I want to know all the primates in the world."


"People, Gorillas, Monkeys, Orangatans, Chimpanzees, what else, tell me all the primates in the world." :LOL it is very sweet! I jsut wish I knew all the primates in the world so I could teach them to her!

OK subscribing now!
post #14 of 366
thanks, teachma, for your input. The IEP meeting was a lot like knocking my head against the wall, just because you know, as parents, you don't have the language for this. And like a lot of moms here, what I have are anecdotes that sure as hell seem significant indicators that she is creative analytical, comprehends beyond her age...she's also sensitive, resistant to change, and perfectionistic. Not to mention explosive. School has been a little hard for her socially, 'cause she has a hard time budging from her ideas.

Anyway, to get with the program...what dd, 8 is doing now, besides reading reading reading, is completely beating the pants off me in Monopoly and Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit. I, it turns out, am truly a miserable Monopoly player. She's off her chess craze, which we were heavy into last year, and is in a knitting phase. And songwriting. I really should get her a taperecorder...because these are just precious. Songs like, "You're not my friend anymore" or "When I grow up, I'm going to be a fairy...unless I'm president" They go on and on. She actually has a great sense of melody, and is trying to teach herself the piano. We are praying for snow, because she has an experiment she wants to do assessing the optimum weight to put on her sled to maximize speed on her fav sledding hill...she's been talking about it since last winter. I hope that we can pull it off and find some meaningful lesson...she wants to present her findings at her school science fair.
This is part of her nature, that she designs experiments on her own and learns stuff about matter, time, energy. It is so unlike my dh and I..I wonder if it comes from her religious watching of the PBS show zoom when she was younger, or if it is just being pulled out of hercsomehow. KWIM? That's what I think gitedness is...these kids just are drawn to learn, and suck up everything in their environment.

Oh, and she will be 8 on Tuesday and her birthday party is tomorrow...send a good thought my way...every b-day has been, um, challenging, but I never learn, and keep having these darn parties. Meltdown #8 on the way!!
post #15 of 366
Originally Posted by Evergreen
I wondered about this as well but DS seems to be figuring it out on his own. He is 32 months now and he can read many words that are in all capitals (his own name, Niamh's name and Canada for some reason LOL!) and he is starting to read other words as well whether they are in capitals or not (ice cream, police, milk etc etc).

For some reason if he can't figure out the word if he spells it out loud then he can figure it out. Like with Canada for example...DH has a shirt that says Canada and he asked what it said and we told him it was Canada and asked him what the letters were so he recited them. Then the next time he saw the word written out he couldn't remember what it was so I asked him to recite the letters and then he knew the word. Is that fairly common when learning to read?

It's hard at this point to figure out when he is actually reading and when he is reciting from memory because he has memorized more than half of his rather large book collection as well as many of the library books we bring home. When he is reciting he gets VERY frustrated when he gets to a page and cannot remember the words that are on it...and approximating the story is not good enough so he freaks out. He has been letting us help a bit but if we "help" too much he will pick up the book and throw it (DH says he has my temper but I think that temper and two year olds go hand in hand right

I am getting a bit frustrated with people expecting him to act older because of his vocabulary. There seems to be this expectation that because he speaks like a child quite a bit older than he actually is that he ought to behave like one as well (ie share well and not "act like a two year old" generally). I keep reminding people (mainly family members) that two year olds do not generally share well and also don't have very good impulse control...so Rhys is completely NORMAL in having those traits!

I often find myself wishing that Rhys fit the mold of a two year old better...honestly being gifted was a pretty mixed bag for me and I really wouldn't have wished it on any of my children if I had the choice. The fact that he is really verbal is helpful because we can discuss things but I don't always handle his need to do everything by himself with as much patience as I should.

I think my biggest worry is that he will be teased and made to feel bad the way that I was in school. I am still on the fence about whether to send him to school at all when the time comes but I have another 2 years before I have to make that decision.

post #16 of 366
lex, that sounds like a really neat kid! he doesn't sound autistic to me, i've met lots of kids that age with really amazing memories (mostly within my family, but even so-- none of them are autistic at all ).

evergreen-- we showed BeanBean capital and lowercase letters, and when we did the "e, for egg" deal, we used proper nouns for the capitals. "e" is for "egg," "E" is for "Eli." it was really funny, we were out with SIL once when he was about 11 months old, and she pointed to a sign and said "look, it's e for Eli!" and he looked at her funny and said "no, e for egg." I had to explain our little system to her. :LOL
post #17 of 366
I'm interested that the topic of giftedness so easily leads to that of autism. I am another mom who has wondered about my very intelligent child's possibly being autistic (I was more concerned about Asperger's, which is somewhere on the spectrum). I guess my concerns were not so much about his incredible memory but his fleeting obsessions and also the fact that he is a little bit OC (not really the D, because I don't consider it a disorder, just an idiosyncrasy) and not too social with others his age. My ds also has "trouble" socially, but it's not because the other kids don't accept him. Rather, he doesn't accept THEM- sees himself as different. For example, when he started a threes preschool program a year and a half ago, he observed that the teacher used the word "friends" to address the students as a group. "Friends, we need to clean up now," etc. During the second month of school, ds asked me, with complete honesty and perplexity, "How come she calls us all friends? They aren't all my friends, just two of them are." He had just turned 3 when he made this remark. Well, hmmm...Wereas other 3 year olds might be more accepting of al the classmates as their friends, ds has always been very discriminating. And I can't argue with him- he gives specific reasons as to why each individual isn't his friend! Interestingly, however, ds is completely socially appropriate with older children- our 8 year old girl neighbor, for example- and even more so with grown ups. I think the child on the spectrum wouldn't know how to be socially appropriate with anyone. My ds just chooses not to be with those his own age. Quite a challenge and sometimes hard for me to accept.
post #18 of 366
Thread Starter 
Teachma, Hollis has no friends his age either. He has plenty of adult friends and (if necessary) can relate to kids on their level (although this wasn't the case until recently), but he just has no interest in socializing with other kids. Except for his sister, who he gets along with great, and one little boy who lives across from my mom who is as weird as Hollis is. He does have a lot of Asperger's traits, but I've heard that Asperger's kids desperately want friends but can't communicate with other kids effectively... definitely not the same as what Hollis is like. He just loves hanging with adults and older kids who can understand what he's talking about.

Lex -- That kid is gifted but doesn't sound autistic to me since he's communicating so effectively. Hollis did the exact same thing with a giant map of the US at that age. It's so cool reading this thread and seeing where all the kids are and remembering back to when my kids were little.
post #19 of 366
Well, my inlaws are in town...

Today I bought Dylan a sheet of stickers and she was taking them off and sticking them back on. I was explaining 'negative space' to her so that she could match which stickers went into which areas. MIL scoffed, "hmmph, what is negative space?" Dylan ever-so-sweetly tried to explain, "Gramma, it is the same space as the sticker, but the shape of the sticker is on the outside not the inside." as she traced the outline.

Then at dinner, my salt shaker is shaped kind of like an egg, with a flat bottom. Dylan turned it upside down and began singing, "Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel I made you out of clay." We are not Jewish, so I may have spelled that incorrectly, sorry. I am an atheist, in fact so I have no idea where she learned about dreidels, but they must have made an impression on her! Anyway, I thought it was so sweet and dh was also quite impressed.

"Do you see that, she is singing the dreidel song!" I said and noticed MIL's face was blank.

"Drop it, they don't know what that is." my husband said to me.

It hit me then, she knows soemthing two grown adults don't. If she is already having to explain things at not even two what do the next eighteen years hold for her?
post #20 of 366
My younger niece has Asperger's. She's very bright, has an amazing memory, and is, in general, very high functioning. She has to work harder than other kids to learn some things (it took months of therapy to get her to hold a spoon, and even longer to get her to bring it to her mouth), is very outgoing with other children but doesn't really play with them-- she tends to play "at" them, or near them. She also rarely makes eye contact except by accident, unless you stand really far away from her. Personal space is a mystery to her-- she either wants to be in your face or 10 feet away. After 6 months of intense therapy, followed by 4 months in Early Intervention preschool, my niece was able to understand that people cry when they are sad and smile/laugh when they are happy; it took that much time for her to grasp facial expressions and their link to emotions.

She still doesn't understand body language, and has serious sensory issues. Oh, and there's *no* sense of danger, even now. BeanBean, at 12 months could understand that if something was hot he didn't want to touch it. But because my niece doesn't feel pain, she doesn't understand that if something is hot she shouldn't touch it; she got a third degree burn on her arm touching a hot comb and didn't even notice it enough to whimper.

When she gets upset or overstimulated (which is often) she throws herself into walls or the floor repeatedly, or she spins around in circles and flaps her arms. She rocks back and forth from one foot to the other when she's talking to you. She's been "different" her entire life; she was first referred for therapy when she hadn't started rolling over on her own yet at 6 months. She didn't crawl at all until she'd been in therapy for three months, and then she just took off. She was cruising by her first birthday, and the physical therapist was very pleased, and said "some kids just need to be shown how to do it the first few times." So, she was very far behind, but she caught up in a hurry with therapy.

Recently, I've heard many people ask if their child might be autistic, and they always say something like "He seems mostly normal but he does x and I read somewhere that kids with Asperger's Syndrom are like that." When I remark that their child doesn't seem remotely autistic they say, "but isn't there a spectrum?" Well, yes, there is, and the fact is my niece is at the high end of it. Many people, adults and children alike, have what might be called "autistic tendencies;" I'd go so far as to say that everyone I've ever met has something which could be siezed upon as justification for a diagnosis of Asperger's (or anything else, really). I used to play a game-- write down everything you do for a week, and give me the list along with two hours and a DSM, and I'll find something to diagnose you with. It rarely takes me that long, but it makes a point: everyone can have a label, if they really want it. That won't make it true or accurate, though.

Wow, that sounds a little bit ranty. I don't mean to come across that way, but this is something that's been really getting on my nerves of late. It seems like everywhere I go, someone's thinking their kid is autistic because they heard that kids with Asperger's seem mostly normal. They do-- but they also seem very different. Most of the people I've heard this from need to put down the abnormal psychology books and read "Raising Your Spirited Child" or something along those lines.
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