Child Prodigy

Everyone in our family knows that Lily has verbal and motor skills in advance of her age. She rolled over early, sat up early, walked early and then talked in sentences early. As a result, we kind of expected Jack to learn skills in advance of his age, too.

Except...he was pretty much right on target for his age. This is not a bad thing by any means, but after a while, I just kind of expected him to develop skills more slowly than Lily did. The only skills he has learned in advance of his age are taking things apart and defeating child safety cabinet locks.

So just imagine my surprise when he crawled up on the couch next to me the other day and started identifying letters on my Nintendo DS crossword puzzle game.

Jack: "Double!" (pointing to a W I had just drawn in) "I see Y!" (pointing)

Me: "Huh?"

Jack: "L! O!"

I was stunned. I thought to myself "he taught himself his letters! He's a prodigy!" I switched the DS to a drawing program and started drawing letter on the screen for him to identify. We went through the whole alphabet. He turned out to be a little shaky on most of the letters, but he definitely knew L, O, W and Y, and he usually got B and D. Even more amazing, when he got the answer wrong, he was using a real letter name, so he definitely knows most of the letter names.

You see, we haven't spent as much time reading to him as we did with Lily at his age. Lily was interested in books at 3 months old, but Jack didn't really show more than a polite interest until a few months ago, when he suddenly became obsessed with books. Now he wants to look at books all the time, but he mostly wants to point things out and identify them rather than have the story read. So, in the last few months, I've spent a lot of time working with him on identifying pictures and colors. I never once thought to teach him letters or numbers. I did notice that when Lily was trying to sound out words we'd spell for her, Jack would often repeat the letters out loud. I figured he'd just learned them by watching and listening. A prodigy!

I couldn't wait for Jim to get home. "Guess what Jack can do? He knows some of his letters!" Jim looked at me blankly and said "Yeah, I've been working on them with him for weeks now."

Oh. Well, I guess he's not the prodigy I imagined, but I am thrilled that he is interested in learning letters so young. Maybe he's going to gain a few more skills in advance of his age than I thought.

Today, as I was talking on the phone with my mom, he called out to me, "Mama! I find a D!" Sure enough, he had identified the letter D in a magazine lying open by the window. I was pretty proud of him, both for finding a letter on his own and for his sentence "I find a D." Of course, soon afterwards he went about his usual business of "breaking" and "jumping,"

I think Jack has unsuspected depths. I don't know if I'm excited or afraid to find out what they are.