Welcome!

Writing the first line of a anything is tough. I always feel the stage-fright setting in when the big white box loads up, the cursor blinking impatiently above empty lines. Are my thoughts interesting enough to warrant so much space? Can I express myself coherently? Is anybody going to care?

I don't know the answers to those questions, but I do know that I need to write this blog. I have a blog already, a personal blog in a different location, and I often talk about my kids. But I don't talk about them honestly, the way I want to talk about them. I'm too afraid of offending my mommy friends. I don't want to be know as a braggart or a lair. I want to connect with other moms, but I fear that by posting, I'll burn more bridges than I build.

Why?

Because my daughter is really bright. I'm not saying she's a genius, but she's well ahead of the "average" kid in areas that count most to many people. She's terribly asynchronous, actually; as many gifted kids are.  But that doesn't always help, because when she seems younger than she really is, her areas of giftedness are all that much more surprising.

At the age of 4 1/2, my daughter is a reader. Last week she read The Wizard of Oz to herself, and when I quizzed her, she could actually tell me the important points in the story. She read it eagerly, easily, and silently. She was somewhat unimpressed when I rented the movie version for her and she discovered that Dorothy's movie shoes are red, and there's a whole lot of singing. She watched half of it and got bored.

She can do math, too. She can add and subtract. She can count by sets. She can tell time on an analog clock. She is learning how to add change and work with money (which would work better if she wouldn't leave her play money on the floor for her brother to eat). She understands fractions, kinda. She can count forwards or backwards until she gets bored; and she can count to at least 30 in Spanish. Back when she was 2 she could count to 100 in Mandarin Chinese, but we stopped playing that game when she started her Spanish bilingual preschool and she's certainly forgotten by now.

That's the short list. I'll post more about her later, many, many times.

Her little brother is 9 months old as of last week. Is he as bright as his sister? Well. He's a baby, so who can say? He says one verbal word and signs two other words, which doesn't seem crazy for his age. (For comparison, his sister had 4 or 5 verbal words and no signs at the same age.) He also has a particular squeal which means "cat!!!" In the last month his other milestones have mimicked his sister's at the same age: he learned to sit himself up, he learned to crawl, and he popped out his first 4 weeks in just under 2 weeks.

And there's me. I'm 34. I used to be gainfully employed, but I got laid off last summer at 6 months pregnant. My husband, who used to be the stay-at-home parent around here, got a great job and went back to work the very week the  baby was born. After nearly a year at home, I still feel odd to be here. Money is tight, but we're surviving.

But back to this blog. Why did I start it? Because I want to talk openly and honestly about my gifted kid (kids?), about the joys and the struggles, about my fears and my insecurities, how tough it feels sometimes to try to find my daughter a safe place in a world which both celebrates smartness and denigrates bright people. I'll probably blog about a lot of non-gifted kid stuff as well, because gifted kid(s) are still kids, and not all of our delights and challenges are related to giftedness.

Welcome.