BelleDameSansMerci : I don't think gifted children are easy at all and the progress that my DD has made in terms of her cognitive abilities and her thinking abilities and the level of comprehension of things have been quite unpredictable i.e. she gains knowledge and thinking ability in spurts and its sometimes quite difficult to keep up as I'd get used to her being this way over the last few months then suddenly she's sort of different. The tempers are phenomenal. She's just turned 4 a few months ago, so really you'd think she'd have outgrown her "terrible twos" phase, but no...
Yesterday DD had a complete meltdown / totally flipped over a bowl of cereal (I gave her Cheerios and she said actually she wanted Cookie Crisp). She was raging like crazy, was impossible to console, and was just thrashing about in anger on the floor and managed to get carpet burn on one of her ankles. If I went near her she'd kick me, hard. When she's like this, nothing can stop it unless I do exactly what she says. I said there's no way I'm going to pour out the cereal and make another bowl just because she's throwing a tantrum about it. It was only a bowl of cereal, and she normally eats Cookie Crisp too, so I really couldn't understand why she flipped. She calmed down after about 20 minutes of this, and I went over and hugged her and assured her its okay... and she made her way to the table and finished her bowl of (already soggy) Cookie Crisps within minutes. And for the rest of the day I still felt a bit shaken by that enormous temper display. It was just at the back of my mind all day and I kept thinking should I have done different - given in to her demands, or was that alright to have let her emotions fly, peak, and blow over in its natural course. She was nice and quite placid the rest of the day and almost like a different child, and that's her really, temper-wise.
She didn't like nursery at all btw. I did try to put her in for a few months last year, but she soon started protesting against going. She said she didn't like nursery because its boring or (I think) she felt that she wasn't getting the attention she needed. She also had difficulty finding friends in nursery for some reason, and her advancedness actually put her at a disadvantage in a school environment because she had the level of comprehension of a much older child and there just wasn't any child in her nursery who could communicate and play with her on that level - whereas at home she had her elder sis who is years older than her and they get on well. One day on her way to nursery she asked me if she could be homeschooled - she must have picked up the word somehow, perhaps overhearing me and DH's conversation, as I was contemplating homeschooling last year as eldest was struggling in school due to undiagnosed SEN (suspected ASD and selective mutism) and was being targeted and bullied to no end and was so afraid of going to school her attendance was poor and the school wasn't very helpful. So I eventually took the plunge and took both DDs out of school/nursery. Older DD has been much happier child since and younger gifted DD, well, apart from the temper tantrums, she is doing well and is able to follow her unusual course of interests (she was obsessed about volcanoes a few days ago). She's starting to read these days and writing words and things. She's asking harder and harder stuff these days to the point where we actually have to research some of it before we can answer it. Hopefully once she learns to read then she can satisfy herself with reading books of interest on her own and not rely so much on an adult to do the reading for her.
I find having a gifted child a very hard job. My gifted child at least, has been very hard to manage on the emotional side of things. If you are wondering if your DD may be gifted, the Ruf's Estimates Levels of Giftedness checklist on the NAGC website can help you. The website is currently down at the moment, but I found a copy of it here : www.dirhody.com/discanner/levels.htm A book I'd recommend for parents of gifted children is "The Parent's Guide to Gifted Children" by James T Webb et. al. . It helped me understand a lot more about the emotional difficulties gifted children face. Gifted children are older brains trapped in a baby's body, and they experience a lot of frustration because they want to do certain things or make things a certain way but because of their age or limits, they can't and feel quite powerless to change things. And emotionally they are still very baby-ish even though they seem very advanced in other areas, and people are't always aware of this - they treat them like adults and expect them to behave with emotional maturity. I have learnt not to treat my DD's emotional upheavals as a negative thing but rather as a consequence of her giftedness and I try to sympathise with her though its tricky doing that whilst not becoming a push-over for an obviously savvy child who can eventually be clever enough to manipulate people - I find giftedness can be a bit scary.