The Little Genius

I only posted the results of Annabel's speech evaulation on Facebook.  I didn't want to post the FULL details because I didn't want to seem like "one of those" moms that likes to brag about things.

But people, a medical professional told me today that our child is a genius.

It's hard to not tell someone so I thought I'd come here to do it.

I'll start at the beginning.

Today was Annabel's speech evaulation.  We had to go to a local children's hospital's branch office to do it.  Our big issue we wanted looked at was that Annabel is almost 2 and she only says about 2-3 words that we can fully understand, dada, that and more.  She also does the sign for more when she says it.  Her speech is also a little muffled.

We started the evaulation just playing on the floor.  The speech therapist (ST) had a little tea set and a toy pig that sang songs.  The ST told me she would just let Annabel play and would take notes.

Annabel poured tea, handed out tea cups to me and the ST.  She pointed to things in the room like she was asking for them and she interacted a ton with the ST.

One of the tests she had to do was point out objects in a book.  The first picture had a ball, an apple and a spoon.  Annabel pointed to the right pictures when the ST said each word.

For fun the ST did a page in the book where she's only allowed to use verbs to describe what is going on in each picture.  She told me if Annabel didn't get them right it was no big deal because the page was for 3 year olds.

One picture was a boy taking a bath, another of a boy playing with blocks, a boy eating ice cream and a boy running.  The verbs were "eating", "bathing", "playing" and "running".  She got them all right and the ST's eyes got really big.

"Now for fun lets try the 4 year old page."  There were 3 pictures of trees.  The first picture had a tree with sunshine, second picture had a tree with rain clouds and rain and the third picture had a tree with fall leaves.

So the ST says to Annabel, "Tom went outside to play and his shoes got wet, what picture was Tom playing in?"  Annabel sat for about 3 seconds reviewing the pictures and pointed to the one with the rain clouds and rain.

Unbelivable.  She did 3 more pages with pointing to objects.  Then she did some activites were she had to follow directions, like "get the teddy bear, pour him a cup of tea and give him a cookie".  Then she did it.  Another one "give mommy a cup of tea, make sure it's not too hot".  So she poured me tea, blew on it and handed it to me.  "Give me 1 block" and she did.

The ST says that in comprehension (following directions, understanding) she scores as a 3 year old but in speech she scores as a 9-12 month old.  Because of the large difference she thinks that she might qualify for some sort of speech therapy but because of her high comprehension score she already knows that she will not qualify for Early Intervention and there is a possiblity she will not qualify for anything at all and we'll just have to do activities at home with her.

I asked her where this will leave us and she looked at me and said "your child is special, she's pretty much a genius, we just need to help her learn to speak."  Then she paused and said, "seriously, your child is a genius".