One of my children has a brilliant mind but something akin to autism keeps it from shining through much of the time. At the tender age of 8 she can read material geared anywhere from mid-middle school to books and magazines intended for adults and understand and recall what she's read. She performs mathematical calculations effortlessly, working nearly two grades ahead of her peers, she "sees shapes from all sides" in her head, a talent that is making her first forays into geometry a breeze, and her gift for sculpting wire and tape and string into the most fantastic animals (usually cats) leaves us baffled.
All this and more are featured in her "thought bubbles" -- her words for "ideas" -- but for reasons that frustrate her and confound us she struggles to voice them. She speaks, but the content of her language is incomplete and peppered with original and creative descriptions for things. She uses words she knows in ever-evolving combinations to explain or describe each new experience.
The other day after a less-than-stellar ballet class she remarked, "My feet lost their thoughts and didn't know what to do."
Or my favorite, spoken on a very sunny day: "The hot is getting into my eyes."
She's getting help for whatever the glitch is that makes processing language trickier than it ought to be, but meanwhile we marvel at her abilities even as we continue our search to help her express them.
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