Fintan resident fashion expert.

Fintan is a sharp-eyed boy, as I have pointed out before. He is also concerned with all things visual - including fashion. The weekend was a case in point.

We found ourselves in a shoe shop, with all three kids in tow. Ainan needed new shoes and kids being kids, we couldn't buy a pair for him, without buying a pair for each of them, too. So, it duly turned into a mammoth shoe hunt with various trendy offerings being tried on.

What struck me, though, about our experience in the shoe shop was how Fintan understood the shoes in the shops. For him, each one was unique. It went like this: "Daddy, those shoes are the ones my friend in K2 wears...and those are the ones my friend in..." He duly pointed out to me the various people in his life that he had seen wearing the shoes of each particular design that caught his eye. It was quite a surprise for me - because I never notice what shoes people are wearing. Fintan, however, had catalogued, in his mind, the things his friends wore - and was able to recognize them, in the shop, as being of a particular person.

To me, this shows two characteristics: a good visual memory - and an attention to detail in his environment.

When I cross-reference this experience to the one of Fintan shouting: "I'm an artist!" while chasing his unwilling art subject brother around the house, I wonder, indeed, if Fintan is, in fact, an artist in the making, as he states, spontaneously. He certainly has the tendency to evaluate the world in a visual way, in great detail.

I have only ever met one other person who could recall what people wore in such detail, before. She was a profoundly gifted girl who ended up working as an art dealer. Thus, if not an artist, I think he will be someone who works around the visual arts. (Though being an artist is actually fairly likely, for him, given the summation of his expressed attitudes and attributes.)

We will just have to wait and see.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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