I told you... MENSA!!

Yesterday I gave Annabelle a blank colouring page and some crayons to entertain herself while I got ready for work. As I passed back and forth through the living room, I occasionally glanced over and was happy to see her very engrossed in her colouring and noted that she seemed to be doing it very neatly. I thought nothing more of it, UNTIL....

An hour later when I dropped her at daycare, Lorinda (her teacher) said to me, "Cass! Look at this!" and she pulled down one of the kiddies pictures that was pegged up on the line and held it up for me to see. It was a colouring page with easter eggs on it and it was all coloured in. I said "Is it a painting?" and she said "It's colouring in, Cass." (duh) "It's Annabelle's. Look at it!!" and I was all "yeah, great..". I mean, so what? She did some colouring. Glad I'm getting my money's worth. She said "Look at all the others", and much to my surprise all the others were random scratches and scrawls and squiggly lines. Annabelle's was fully coloured in. Every egg was fully coloured and even though she had gone out of the lines, she had gone out of the lines very consistently, almost like each egg had a little fuzzy shadow around it. She said "I would expect this from a four or five year old". Well, I almost couldn't get out of the room my head was so big. You'd think it was me who was the best colour-inner, I was so puffed up with pride. Clearly I'm not biased after all. Even the daycare teacher thinks she's a freakin' genius.

There's more though. Did I tell you she recognises letters? (I can't remember what I've told you and can't be arsed going back to look). So for quite a while now, she has seen the letter "A" on various signs, number plates etc and recognised it as "Annabelle". At first we had no idea what she was talking about when she pointed at something and said "Two Annabelles! Look mummy!" but eventually we caught up.

Then one day while she was in the bath, we were playing with her foam letters and out of interest, I held up the "E" and asked her "What's this?". She immediately replied "Ebby". I went on to "C". "Cody", she said. "M". "Maddie and Mona!" I was blown away. As long as there's a kid in the daycare centre whose name starts with a letter, she recognises the letter as the name. So I've been using that to teach her letters and sounds and she's really catching on.

Then there's counting of course. We're up to 15. I know that doesn't make her a child genius but I was told that at daycare they are usually only counting up to five or ten, so somewhere she has learned on her own to get to 15.

And a few weeks back, I had another conversation with Lorinda, who was really excited at Annabelle's recognition of colours. Apparently they were playing a game and Lorinda would hold something up and ask what colour it was and always the first big voice to shout out the colour was Annabelle.

What do you think? Should I enrol her straight into university?