Today I decided to start writing about my son. He turned five years old a month ago and it's been really challenging for my husband and I to raise him. The more I think about it, the more I think maybe it would be helpful to other families out there to read about our experiences and hopefully share some of theirs. I've learned quickly that it's quite isolating to raise a gifted child and very difficult to find answers to daily questions. I figured it could be therapeutic to write about our experience as well as a great way to just remember all the stuff that has been happening in our lives!
"Trying to increase the alpha wave activity."
Guess I will back up a few years and start when we first figured out something was 'different.' Our son was about 18 months when we started seeing differences in him and other kids. Maybe I should back up a little more since my husband tells me I may have been the cause for some of this because of the way I handled my pregnancy and very early years of our sons life. We tried for a long time to get pregnant and finally settled on in-vitro fertilization so I felt pretty lucky to be pregnant at all and was determined to have the perfect pregnancy! I read every book by the time I was 3 months pregnant. One thing that really stood out for me was literature I read about introducing the fetus to sound in-utero. After some research, we settled on the Baby Plus System - that you strap on to your tummy twice a day. It was really cool and I have to say it had quite an affect on the baby. I used it up until the day he was born and if there was a day I had something going on and I didn't get a chance to use it or was even a little late putting it on, he could kick and raise a total raucous. Clearly he was into it - whether it made him smarter or not, I have no idea but he clearly came to depend on it and like it. He also was a preemie and when we brought him home from the hospital, we used it externally for the first week and it seemed to calm him down everytime he cried. It was a very cool gadget!! I also read to him in-utero every day, kept super healthy, didn't wear deodorant with aluminum or pump gas. So overall, I was very cautious.
Okay, so back to out of the womb! Right from the beginning we noticed that he was very alert, and strong. He was a preemie but came out perfect weight, holding his head high and eyes open. We noticed early on that he was very intense and it was clear that he was not going to walk until he could do it perfectly. So he watched all his buddies get up and fall down a lot and he kept crawling around and watching until finally he took off walking and did it quite steadily and never looked back.
Then came all the milestones that we came to understand later were pretty advanced. It wasn't until I read the book by Deborah Ruf, PhD - Losing Our Minds that I started thinking about his milestones and writing them down. If you haven't heard about this book, it's a must read for parents with gifted children or if you are questioning whether your child is gifted, she will for sure answer many of your questions. We just thought it was normal that he was looking at pictures in a book and turning the pages by himself at 3 months, using sign language to communicate at 6 months, and starting to introduce his imaginary friends at just under two. Little did we know that over 20+ imaginary friends would come to live with us by the time he was four!
As I am thinking about the milestones, what keeps popping into my mind that really set him apart from other children when he was about two were his interests and obsessions. Next entry I will write about those. Enough for now.
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