Tiarnan invents a new way to climb

Yesterday, Tiarnan, fourteen months, did something I have never heard a baby doing. He walked up the stairs backwards.

He started at the bottom, and reversed up two flights of stairs, clearly enjoying himself throughout until he got to the top.

This showed me something interesting about his motor skills: he does not need to see where he is going, anymore, to be surefooted - he has that unconscious, internal sense of where his limbs are and does not seem to need the constant feedback of vision that a young baby normally needs.

He didn't miss a step. He didn't stumble and he didn't fall - he just climbed backwards all the way up to the top. He did so quite quickly too.

In this action, I see Tiarnan's creative imagination at work - always seeking a new way to do an old thing; or a new way to do something he has never done before. Many children, having learnt to conquer the stairs, for instance, would, thereafter use the same method each time. Tiarnan is different: he has a need to experiment, to try a variation or find a new theme. It is in little things like this that a baby reveals their creative identity. If your baby is always trying to do things in new ways, then that baby is a creative child, who could and should grow up to be a creative adult.

I wonder what led Tiarnan to try this: what wondering thought did he have to see what it would be like to do so?

What a curious boy.

(If you would like to read more of Tiarnan, fourteen months, or Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and four months (today), or Fintan, three, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, the creatively gifted, gifted adults and gifted children. Thanks.)