A Humourous Look at an Above Average Toddler

From the time he learned to talk I never knew what come out of my son's mouth, or what was going on in his head.

At the age of two my son could carry on an intelligent understandable conversation with most anyone. He could also tell you every letter of the alphabet on sight.

I never conversed with my son with "infant babble"; I spoke to him like any other person. Once he began to talk, it poured out of him like a water faucet.

Walking home from the store one day he tells me a sign said stop. When I asked him how he knew that; he informed me that S-T-O-P spelled stop.

The why stage could prompt a 30 minute conversation of answering the simple question of why. One Sunday morning a major conversation ensued when my son asked the question, what are you doing? I'm reading the newspaper. Why? Thirty minutes later the conversation had finally come to an end.

In 1984 my then four year old son and I traveled to New Orleans to visit a friend and see the World's Fair. On the bus ride home my son spent a good bit of the trip talking with the bus driver. This was no simple chit chat, but a complex conversation of the beach and girls including trying to convince the driver to stop so they could go on the beach, making biscuits - the complete home made recipe, and numerous other subjects. I sat and listened to this conversation with awe and amusement. I can only imagine what the bus driver must have thought carrying on with this four year old child.

At the time I worked in food service and he would help me stock the shelves. To me it was work; for him it was fun. And he did it all correctly.

My toddler did indeed understand everything I and most everybody else said. He seemed to understand things I had no idea of how he figured them out or knew them (like when my sister in law was pregnant). But then again this was no "typical" toddler. To borrow a phrase from Yogi Bear, "he's smarter than the average bear."