My youngest girl's siblings are outgoing and fearless. She is the same, as are most young children. But unlike the other two she is very sensitive- overly so. She is also brighter. In a few weeks times she will be 4 years old and some of the things she says astound us sometimes. There is also the incredible memory she has which maybe masquerades as intelligence. In her own way she is very different from her brother and sister. In fact those two are very alike.
Her memory as I said is quite unbelievable for her a child her age. She retains so much. For nearly two years she has been able to recite the alphabet and count to 20. This alone is not much but the capacity for remembering things is illustrated in other ways. About a year ago my wife took the kids to her mother's house for the weekend and when they came back she had a book which had been bought for her- about 10 pages with about 2 sentences per page. So I sat her on my knee and told her I would read the book to her. To my amazement every page I opened she read out word for word. Not obviously reading but from memory. When I asked my wife how many times the book had been read to her she said 3 or 4 times. She was approaching 3 years old at the time.
I've even found myself asking her for guidance. They watch 'Spongebob Squarepants' and we have 10 episodes which includes two per episodes. So when they want a particular one I have to ask her which one of the twenty it is and she tells me. Her older doesn't know despite watching it always with her. So many ways. She will sit in her own little world and recite 5-10 minute dialogues from 'Horrid Henry'. She will recite songs she has not sung for many months. There are so many examples I could give.
On the downside though she is super sensitive. Drying her hair and brushing her hair has her screaming the house down. Any little thing seems to bother her. When she was younger even washing her hair was damn near impossible at times. That though I put down to my wife's mum who is very much old school.She stayed there for a week and came back with this problem of having her hair washed. However well meaning I am sure when the suds got in her eyes her granny would not have been as sensitive as we are- maybe we are too sensitive. And so it took months of coaxing to finally get her at ease with getting her hair washed. We had to get a cap which stopped the water going into her eyes to begin with and then slowly remove that. The washing now is not a problem but the drying and the brushing still is- which happens a lot as my wife insists the children are bathed every single night. And in lots of other ways she is more sensitive than the other two.
As for intelligence over memory there is still a bit more of that in her. As an example I will give the kids TV program 'Captain Mack'. This irritating offering has some star captain who jets off to Sunshine city in one of his rockets. Every time he goes he takes a different coloured rocket- either yellow, blue or red. And on his journey there he flies over the sea where sometimes a whale jumps out of the water and sometimes not. The girls have turned this part into a game which ends up in one of them crying in defeat and the other sometimes trying to annoy the other to bring more tears. When he is about to launch the girls guess what colour of rocket he will take- mummy and daddy have to join in too. Then we all have to say whether it is going to be "whale" or "no whale". Randomly they would invariably get the colour of the rocket correct but every time it came to the whale she would always get it right much to her sister's annoyance. I had already worked out it worked on a system but had not mentioned it to the girls- sly old dad. So I was intrigued as to how she was getting it right every time so asked her. And it was exactly as I thought: if the rocket was red or blue there was a whale but if it was yellow there was no whale. Not rocket science but this was a year ago when she was two so quite a bit of logic and logic that her sister, twice her age at the time, never saw.
It got me to thinking. I read recently about Rupert Sheldrake's theory of Morphic Resonance. That is his thinking that there is a collective consciousness that similar species can tap into. In his view that fact that Blue Tits in Scotland found that by pecking through the silver foil on milk bottle tops they could get milk at around the same time as the same birds were doing it in England was down to this collective consciousness of a species. Similarly the claim that sheep in England were escaping from fields over cattle grids by doing a commando style roll at about the same time as sheep in Australia were doing the same thing was down to this morphic resonance. Now I had already worked out the system and then my youngest girl came to the same conclusion. In all cases was she tapping in to the knowledge via morphic resonance or was it just that she arrived at the same conclusion set with the same problem? That we will probably never know.
I would hope his theory is wrong and I'll tell you why. Were that the case then what else could she tap into? My anxiety of course. Is this why she is such a sensitive child? I see my own introspection in her when she sits in her own little world playing games, reciting scripted dialogue and having to be shouted at 4 or 5 times to snap out of it. I see it in her sensitivity to things- though in saying that her sister was howling the other day when she was calling her "Bum face" non stop so maybe sensitivity runs in the family. But she is very different and I hope the good outweighs any problems she may have in future. Certainly for now she is a very happy little girl who wants for nothing materialistic- unlike her sister. She is content in her own company as she is with others. The nursery tell us she is a very sociable little girl. And she has a boyfriend- that will be getting nipped in the bud when I am able to go to nursery!
All in all though she may just be a product of being a middle child who is sometimes overlooked. There may alternatively be no problems at all and she may just be average of mind but an oversensitive father is reading too much in to things. Ultimately though I wouldn't change her in any way. Sometimes she can be a strange little girl but that is not always a bad thing.
