I have a terrible cold and am not in the mood for surfing and linking, so let me just tell you some stories about my kids.

For the past couple of years, we’ve struggled to get our youngest son to talk. Most kids say their first words by the 12 months. Ian did say a few words at that age, but then stalled. His vocabulary only expanded beyond a handful of words at age three. He’s almost five now. His speech is much improved, but still is pretty limited. He can answer simple questions, but questions that involve more than one word answers still stump him. He can’t tell me what he did at school that morning. He’ll initiate conversations to tell me what he wants or what he’s thinking about. He’ll ask “where” questions. “Where’s Jonah? Where my train?” But he almost never asks why, something that three year olds normally do. He needs many more years of speech therapy.

While Ian may be two years behind other kids in the speech department, he’s unusually good at other things. He taught himself how to read. At 24 months, he knew his alphabet and numbers. Shortly after that, he started reading logos. He would flip over videoes and read all the logos on the back of the case: Sony Home Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Nick Jr. His favorite parts of videos are the beginning when the logos flash up and the credits. He often fast forwards through his DVDs to the credits. The credits have music and moving words. He’ll study the words and sound them out trying to figure out what they say. I never taught him phoenics.

Yesterday, when I picked him up from daycare, his aide said that the teacher distributed a poem about April to the class. The kids were asked to pick out words that they knew. If they knew a word, the teacher underlined it. The smartest kids had three words underlined. Ian’s entire poem was underlined.

A little boy in the class came up to me and asked, “how does Ian know how to read?” I don’t know, I answered. It’s probably for the same reason that he’s never asked me a “how” question.

Ian is both disabled and gifted. He reads better than some seven year olds, but his speech is less developed than some three year olds. It could be worse. There are many other tics and whirrs in the brains of other little kids like Ian. Luckily, Ian seems to have escaped those problems.

We’re going to place him in a regular Kindergarten next year. When he’s around other kids, he does much better. He’ll need an aide to shadow him, to keep him on task, to help him with his worksheets. Hopefully, he’ll make another leap in the next year.

Still, these gifts and disabilities don’t define my kid. He’s much more than all that. He’s my little guy who crawls into my bed in the morning for a snuggle. He’s the kid who worships his older brother following him around and imitating his every move. When I pick him up from daycare, he leaps up from the lap of his aide. “Mama! Mama! Great big, happy hug.” There is something fantastic about a kid whose face lights up when he sees me and is made so content by the great big, happy hug.