I know, the term is officially “idiot savants.” They’re not quite idiots, my boys. They’re plenty smart, they’re just not overly clever sometimes. Dufus seems about the right term for someone who walks out of a public washroom with a vaguely puzzled look on his face and asks, completely lacking in guile, “Did I have underwear on when I left the house this morning?” (They likely got left in the pool changeroom at day camp. At least, that’s what I choose to believe.)<\/p>\n
Anyway, dufuses, yes. But savants as well. At the dinner table recently, Tristan announced \u00c3\u00a0 propos <\/em>of nothing, “Mom, I can spell my name backwards.” And proceeded to do so. Then he went on to spell Mommy, Daddy, Simon, Lucas, Costco, Webkinz, and bacon backwards. We were suitably impressed. He even did a few requests. He’s barely learned how to spell things forward by sounding them out, and can do it backwards in his head as well.<\/p>\n But we were positively gobsmacked when we were out with Simon the other day and he announced from the back seat that he could spell “Tristan” backwards — and proceeded to do it flawlessly. Beloved and I regarded each other with open mouths of astonishment. I frankly didn’t think he could spell his own name reliably forwards, let alone spell his brother’s name backwards. This from a four-year-old preschooler who regularly omits the number 14 when counting to twenty.<\/p>\n I’m thinking with a little practice, they’ll be those freakishly precocious kids you see on TV, the ones who can name any country you point at on the map or have memorized the periodic table of the elements in utero<\/em>. Anybody have the contact info handy for David Letterman’s people?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I know, the term is officially “idiot savants.” They’re not quite idiots, my boys. They’re plenty smart, they’re just not overly clever sometimes. Dufus seems about the right term for someone who walks out of a public washroom with a vaguely puzzled look on his face and asks, completely lacking in guile, “Did I have … Continue reading “My dufus-savants”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ah-me-boys"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}