My Ingenious Little Genius By Holly Searle

When my son was born, I thought to myself "He's been here before."

From the very off he was like a wise little old man and not like a child at all. He was always interested in everything and anything and needed a constant diet of new information and added distractions to keep him occupied.

As he grew, he developed a keen sense of what was right and what was wrong. He cannot abide any form of injustice (I can't think where he gets that from) and if he is able too, he will try to amend the reason for it, too benefit those affected.

I remember once when he was in primary school being retold a story by one of the classroom assistance about his attitude towards one such incident.

During break, he had become aware of an incident against another child and in his effort to make this right, the playground assistant had misinterpreted his actions and had told him off and had sent him indoors.

When the classroom assistant went to check on him, she found him sitting crossed legged, with his hands palms up, with his middle finger and thumb touching. The assistant (who knew him very well) asked him what he was doing. To which he responded “I'm meditating.”

He was seven.

When I first heard that story, I started to wonder, if, he was in fact, the 15th Dalai Lama. It still makes me chuckle when I think about him sitting there like that, as I have absolutely no idea were he had ever come across any one in the lotus position or how on earth he knew what meditating was?

It was beyond me.

He has just started secondary school, which he was ready for. Being a September baby (like me), he was always the eldest in his class and often felt the weight of it. After a minor struggle to get him accepted into the school of his choice, he was excited about his new beginning. I was concerned about his two bus journey to and from the school, so over the Summer I prepared him and when the start date arrived on his twelfth birthday in early September, he was was so ready, that he hardly slept the night before and appeared in full uniform at the foot of my bed an hour before we were due to get up. It was priceless.

I mentally closed my eyes and held my breath and sent him off to school and his new beginning. I am very proud to say, he made it and has taken it all in his stride like a duck takes to water.

With his new school came new rules and regulations to be adhered too. One was the signing of his homework book. He is required to obtain my signature on a weekly basis as a sign of my parental responsibility that he has completed his homework. If he fails to obtain this, he will be given a detention as a punishment.

A few weeks ago he returned home from school and announced to me that he was cross with me because I had forgotten to sign his homework book and he had subsequently been given a detention. I pointed out to him that he did need to remind me that I had to sign his book. He agreed and the matter wasn't discussed any further.

A few days later he returned home from school and told me that he had taken the science lesson that day. He was beaming and so was I and here is why.

On the day of the detention, he is required to sit in a classroom with other children who had also fallen foul to its imprisonment for one reason or another.

He tells me that they were all situated in a one of the science classrooms. The other children are all mucking about, which he is so affronted by and that he ignores them and instead spends the half an hour reading a poster on the wall of the classroom that lists The Five Kingdoms of life on earth. No I didn't know either. Apparently this is a classification system that lists the five forms of life on the planet. Here they all are: Monera, Protists, Fungi, Plants and Animals.

The detention ends.

The following day he has a science lesson and the question put to the class by their teacher is, can anyone name the Five Kingdoms. The only respondent to this question is my son. He duly raises his hand and then reels off the five he has stored in his memory and during the course of which, his teacher asks him to come to the front of the class and explain it all to his fellow classmates, which he does.

I am so proud and all the guilt I had felt by not signing his homework book vanishes as I realise that if I had done so, he would never had used his time wisely to acquire this knowledge.

I also realise, as I have always suspected, that my son is an ingenious little genius that will go far.