Tiarnan and the natural world.

Tiarnan is seventeen months old. For him, many things are new - and it is in watching him witness them for the first time, that I, in turn, come to a new appreciation of all that is around me. That is part of the joy of being a father.

Today, we took Tiarnan for a walk in a green area nearby. Many of my readers are from America and will not, perhaps, be familiar with the kind of things one can find here, so I will explain, in due course.

We showed him a plant with a special property, today and encouraged him to touch it. Once he did so, the leaves of this dark, low-lying plant folded up at once and hid away, retracting away from his finger. He was quite taken by this, since it is the first plant he has ever seen which MOVES, when touched.

He did it again and again, touching plant after plant and watched them duly hide away.

We indicated that we were to go - and Tiarnan then acknowledged the plants' strange new status by waving goodbye to them. The little green ones had impressed him in a way that no other plant ever had - and so he accorded them personhood. After all: if a plant can MOVE - it must be alive, in an animal-like way - I assume, he thought.

It was very sweet to watch him react this way to the plant. In all his seventeen months, he had never seen a plant react to touch by moving away - and now one had. It was beautiful to see the surprise dance in his eyes. More beautiful still was it to see him wave goodbye to them, as if to a new found friend.

The plant is the Mimosa, found in Singapore, which is low lying and has dark, delicate leaves that behave in a peculiar way. When the plant is touched, the leaves retract, at once, and fold themselves up, in hiding.

There were other things, too, that impressed Tiarnan - but it was the Mimosa, I suspect, which he will always remember.

(If you would like to read more of Tiarnan, seventeen months, or his gifted brothers, Ainan Celeste Cawley, seven years and seven months, or Fintan, four years and no 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, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, the creatively gifted, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

Fintan goes swimming

Yesterday, Fintan,three, took to the pool. Typically, being Fintan, he found something unusual to do there.

Unlike other kids, who swam as humans do, Fintan decided upon something a little different. It might be helpful to know that, so far, none of our children have had any formal swimming lessons. So, when they try to swim, they do so from their own resources. Fintan tried to swim, but never having been taught to do so, he had to try his own method. What did he do? He swam like a dolphin. He adopted the characteristic up and down motion that dolphins use to propel themselves through the water, with his legs substituting for the tail he did not have. It is difficult to describe exactly what he did, but the result was very characteristic of dolphins: he basically looked as if he were patterning a dolphin's movement, overlaying the way it moved onto his limbs.

I thought this both funny and smart. You see a dolphin is a very good swimmer indeed. Fintan must have realized that - so when presented with the problem of how to swim, he decided to try it the way the dolphin does. It worked in propelling him forward, but, for a human this method of going up and down in the water, legs flexing as one, like an imaginary tail, has one drawback: it keeps one's head under the water for long periods. Thus, he can only swim so far, before he has to stop for air. A dolphin would just leap out of the water, breathe, and continue to swim: a human is not equipped to do that really - not strong enough.

Fintan is a good observer of the natural world and his use of the way an animal moves to teach him something has a long and worthy precedent. You see, Kung Fu is derived in the same way: studying the way animals move and adopting a human version of their movement is behind many of the "styles" of this ancient martial art. Fintan doesn't know this - but he does know one thing: the dolphin swims well - so perhaps he could, too, if he did what a dolphin did.

To a very great degree, Fintan did swim like a dolphin, yesterday. Well done, my athletic boy!

(If you would like to read more about Fintan, three, or his gifted brothers, Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and three months, and Tiarnan, thirteen 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, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, baby genius, savant, the creatively gifted, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)