Time to re-read Kuttner's "Absalom" again. One of the most acidly chilling last lines of any story... but only for parents of semi-adult children.

"No desire to take over the world."

Are you sure?

Wait about 13 yrs, then report back.

Very funny, Peter!

You won't know about super-slow aging for awhile yet -- or about whether Gilgamesh wound her clock.

Then there are these (real) signs:

Reading in bed with a flashlight (and when the flashlight is confiscated discovering elaborate wiring leading to lighting fixtures in bed)

Which also involves massive numbers of books IN the bed. In the blankets. With a child sleeping on them.

Books on the floor in every room in the house
Books on every flat surface of the house
Books in the sink!

bookcases with no room

bookcases with books stacked on either side of them.

Reading evolves as something your children earn as a privilege. This causes quixotic effects when they come home with "reading incentive" forms from school designed to get kids to read.

wires and batteries start appearing at random spots - say the bathroom - at an accelerated pace

electrical outlets mysteriously "blow themselves up" (happened TWICE!)

You have conferences with teachers about your child's reading problem - and they mean they read so much they are not listening in class.

You will have LOTS of conferences with teachers.....

Random jars of unidentified (mostly organic) items start appearing in odd places in the backyard/kitchen/on the child's desk/head board/backpack/pockets/hair

Odd blue stains appear on the child's mattress because they thought "it would be neat to grow some crystals there" (these coordinate nicely with the spots where the carpet has mysteriously solidified into a solid mass impervious to all attempts to break it, including hammering.)

Another note from a teacher (NOT happy) because your 3rd grader informed the teacher that her science fact only worked in a gravity well - in front of the class

(Same kid also informed a later teacher extolling the virtues of abstinence to the high school kids in class that "It didn't work for Mary....)

Another kid also informed a teacher that her numbers for the relative size of earth and the moon were wrong. Elementary teachers (even in private schools) are often very poorly prepared to teach science and in this case again the child was right. The teacher, however took it as a measure of disrespect that the kid did not accept what she said blindly.

To yet another school.....

Fourth grader in the back seat on the last five minutes of a trip to school asks "So it is a philosophy or a fact that whatever we are going to do is already set or are we really building our own futures?" (I suspect this leads to the inevitable loss of parental omnipotence that occurs shortly afterward)


Another last 30 seconds before we get there question:

Do we see different colors when we see what we call a color or all we all seeing the same thing? Is that a philosophical question or a science question?

You start hiding your own books (even SF – how old do you have to be to read Stranger? Spider Robinson? etc – answer is OLDER THAN 8) – this does NOT help the book storage problem...

Kid designs and launches rockets with different weights and nose cone configurations to experiment with how that would affect the distance and height that they flew. Teacher gives him D because the “Handwriting was poor, experiment did not fit the examples in the book”.

That was the last year of public school...

Nine year old starts picking on the plausibility of a science fact in an SF plot. So if the moon really moved closer to the Earth wouldn’t it stop orbiting and spiral down to crash into the Earth?

Kids start questioning things – why should we do that? why should we care what they think? (This sounds great until it is your kid questioning what the point is in showing what they can do to teacher at school. At eight years old. )

Be prepared for breathless answers to simple questions like “What do you like about science at school?” (Said apparently without inhaling)

Why do we have to do volcanoes again in science? Why can’t we do frogs? How does the nervous system of frogs get signals to the outer casing of axons – the casings are like rubber it won’t let electricity in so how does the electricity get in and how do the muscles receive those signals? The chemicals come in through little hatches in the sides of the axons that let in some chemicals but keep out others (like valves) and that’s how they get the signals? The electricity is contained in the chemicals? It starts out half negative and half positive and turns all negative and then the little negative part that they just shut out goes to another axon and how is that controlled? Also why do auroras happen? The huge magnetic field is going to switch and it’s getting weaker and weaker and that is why the auroras are getting brighter in some places and dimmer in other places so that auroras are like fighting around the magnetic field because the radiation is coming and the auroras are like, saying hey get out of here to the radiation and it’s igniting the little gasses in the air except sometimes it reflects off them too and because radiation can never hit the exactly the same place twice (unlike lasers) that’s why it looks like its moving...

And some really hard ones

Kid informs you as an adult that he always thought that if he didn’t design an FTL drive he was some kind of failure...

(Smaller) kid says no one at school wants to talk about the things he likes to talk about

Kid starts “dumbing down” what they write at school so they do not look so different....
then they come home and write entire stories about mythological beasts and Indian villages that would be very plausibly in a published book if it were not written on a tiny 2X3 inch notepad.

All in all it IS worth it – (And you can’t quit now anyway!)

Enjoy the ride!

Audrey--
I'm still holding out hope that he'll make that FTL breakthrough in my lifetime.

sorry we didn't "get" them to do it they were basically born that way...this has its drawbacks

Sometimes the babies grow up and send you things like this:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pfwY2TNehw


Enjoy!

(from Bob- probably the youngest member of the old Heinlein Forum - first posted when he was about nine I think.....)

Audrey --

I read all the time in grammar school. I suspect my test scores were warning enough, and the teachers all let me read with a book under the lip of my desk. It was either that or put up with my questions and critiques.

And let me tell you -- old enough to actually read a book is old enough. I had free access to all the books in the house, including those meant for over 21. I was already so overeducated that it didn't matter, and I didn't bug my friends with the contents of my reaing.