The Art of Learning Patience.

Today, I was with my two younger sons in a food court. These are typically Singaporean food outlets at which a large range of different stalls offer various foods and drinks of several cuisines. They are usually laid out with the food stalls on the periphery - as this one was - with seating in the central area.

"What do you want?", I asked my three year old son, Tiarnan.

"Green tea.", he said, his little finger pointing out the canned drink in question. This is a popular drink in Singapore and consists of brewed green tea with sugar added.

Fintan also indicated the tea.

Finding a table was hard. The first table we went to was empty barring a single girl.

"Can we sit here?" I asked.

"Taken." she said, of the empty chairs.

I didn't believe her. You see, before she answered she took a long appraising look at my young children and seemed to decide that they wouldn't make good, proximate, company.

After some hunting, we found someone who agreed to let Tiarnan and Fintan (five) sit at their table.

I left them with the green teas, cups full of ice - on a mission to buy a local dessert.

The queue was quite long at the dessert stall. So it was about ten minutes before I was served. As I waited, I looked over regularly at my two boys, some twenty five metres away. They seemed quite happy. They spent most of the time facing each other, as if in conversation. Occasionally, I saw them toy with their cups. I thought them to be enjoying their drinks. It was notable that they did NOT run around, nor unsettle the people next to them.

After perhaps a dozen minutes I returned and sat down with the dessert in hand.

Fintan looked sidelong at me and picked up his can of green tea - and tilted it subtly towards me so that I might see its top.

It hadn't been opened. I looked across at Tiarnan's: neither had his. I had forgotten to open their cans for them!

I was at once struck with the maturity and control with which they had sat so long waiting for me to return, considering that neither of them had actually had a drink to nurse during that time. I felt a flash of unexpected parental pride. I was impressed. It was a little thing - but, given their ages: three and five, I really didn't expect them to have been able to sit so patiently, so long, without anything to drink or to do, other than to talk to each other. Clearly, they have found ways of conversing that fill the time more than adequately.

I opened the cans and let them enjoy them, as I smiled a little to myself. It is funny how, even at the most unexpected moments, one's children can be surprising - even if in ways that might be overlooked, if one wasn't attentive to them.

Thank you, Tiarnan and Fintan, for having learnt enough of the art of patience, to have waited for me so long.

(By the way, no one ever did sit down at the "taken" table I had first enquired at - at least not in the time we were there.)

(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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