A Very Quirky Life

It's been hectic. No end of hectic here. We now have activities five days per week, and my being a moderately introverted homebody means I'm up to my eyeballs, and not particularly digging it. But, it's just for the summer. I can manage for the summer.  Anyway! Blogs may be a little sporadic as I try to keep my sanity as best as I can. One of these seasons I'll remember to not overschedule the blazes out of us, but it seems this is not the season. It does, however, bring me rather neatly to my point for today: the quirks of the gifted. How does this fit? Easy - one of my own quirks is the driving need to DO ALL THE THINGS!

Ages and Stages of Being Gifted

We see so much about giftedness through our own lenses. But for this hop, I wanted to branch out a little, and get some perspective from other people - even those who don't necessarily feel connected or part of the Gifted Community. Since there are so many different ages and stages this could cover, I wanted to hit on as many as possible. As such, I took to interviewing, and today I get to share my results with you.

A Day In The Life

One of the first things I learned as I grew up was that there are as many different ways to do things as there are people doing them. People stop and wonder "homeschooling? how does that work?" and each person the question is posed to will have a different answer. Even within the same nuclear family. Crazy, right? Well, Gifted Homeschoolers' Forum has come to the rescue on that one! This month, get a look into how many different families homeschool, and how they answer the question of "What's a day in the life of a gifted homeschooler like?"

I spent several years before Mad Natter was born on a forum. We used to do occasional DITL (Day In The Life) posts, and in keeping with how I've always done, below the jump will be an extremely picture heavy look at a day in our lives - lucky you, it happened to be tax return day!

How do YOU say "Gifted"?

This week, Mad Natter had a visit to the doctor. Our regular GP had been on maternity leave the last time we were in for his checkup, so we did a whole evaluation - which inevitably brings about the question, "so, how's school?" Homeschooling helps a bunch of that, as it's really easy to report on his progress, but when the doctor asks things like "why are you homeschooling? Do you just like it?" you have a choice. You can give a non-committal answer and hope for the best, or you can choose to tell the care provider the whole truth about your child. Naturally, you want the doctor to have the most complete information about your child as possible, but what do you do then?

Gifted in "Reel" Life!

When I was small, before I knew - and long before I understood - words like "undiagnosed" and "gifted" and how they applied to me, I loved to read.  I still do.  Back then, I was reading Encyclopedia Brown, The Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew, A Wrinkle in Time, and my favorite, so much so that I'm suddenly astounded I neither own, nor have read these books in ages, was a series called "The Great Brain." The first book of the series being published in 1967, there are the usual issues with stereotyping, but when you're looking back at something you loved, you don't really realize how awful it was - kind of like the Hunt For Tiger Lily scene from Peter Pan.

Parenting Reality in the Land of Willful Ignorance.

Every so often we run into folks who just don't get what life is like at our house. They have an image of what a "gifted child" is in their head, and when our life doesn't match that image, obviously it is because none of us are gifted. I wish, fairly frequently, that our lives matched that image, but they just don't.  However, the fact that we aren't all bookworms who enjoy studying, who raise their hands first, or who don't have parties, but instead have Socratic Conversations over weekends, while engaged in high-profile careers which allow us to have a housekeeper, and incredibly flexible hours so we're mostly paid to just think...  Well, people seem to not realize that no, that's not what gifted (much less 2E!) is. At least, not by and large (I can't speak for people I don't know!).

At our house, gifted means three computers running while the television plays a video, and Spotify plays music. Half the time, there is someone either running through the house, or falling over, and the rest of the time we're all sitting down. There is no "mildly emotional" area, it's either fine or end-of-the-world.

Finding Community

Sitting on the verge of pneumonia, it's pretty easy to see where community would be really handy. Someone to keep an eye on Mad Natter for a couple hours so I could sleep would have been a dream come true, but it shook out that Skeeve had to work, and our physical community... Well, either they were working too, or they were five hundred miles away wishing they could help, even though we all knew it just wasn't possible. It's one of those rare times that online community just doesn't help - about six hours before I finally fell incredibly ill, my brains started dribbling out my ears and I couldn't understand what my usually wonderfully adroit friends and comrades were saying, and worse, they couldn't understand me anymore either.