Kids (and mine are smarter than yours)

There are different forms of intelligence, that is for sure. However, I decline to accept the popular "multiple intelligence" theory that strives only to identify everyone as intelligent. Compared to other animals, yes, humans are "intelligent." However, amongst humans, the average person is hardly "intelligent."

For a long time, we thought that our daughter was gifted but that our son was, shall we say, average. However, I've watched the boy over the years (almost four at this point), and I've observed in him a deep intelligence, probably close to the English word for "cunning."

Natalie is obviously gifted. She and I work on multiplication and division (though she doesn't know it; I just ask, so if we're buying three Slurpees at 1.25 a piece, then how much am I spending?; or If I have 12 cookies, then how much do I give to myself, mom, you, and Mark?). She's also, as I bragged about earlier, reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on her own. By the way, in case you don't know, she'll turn just seven in a month.

Mark is another case entirely. While Natalie could count into the hundreds by pre-school, Mark won't count for us at all. If I hold up seven fingers and ask, "How many fingers am I holding up?" he'll either just stare at me, state something ridiculously random, or ask me if I know how many fingers I am holding up. Nonetheless, I can give him green beans for dinner, and he'll say, "Why did you give me eleven green beans?" Then I'll look and see 11 damn green beans.

Mark figures things out independently, and far better than Natalie. I showed him some on-line Sesame Street games, and he not only plays them (which means that he knows the alphabet, numbers, and can understand sequences--for many of the games demand such knowledge), but he navigates between them on his own.

Mark is an interesting boy. He's prone to stubbornness--which I am told is a trait that runs well in my family, especially amongst the XY chromosomes--, and has violent tantrums--again, an especially masculine attribute in my bloodline. And yet, he's the one who, at two years old, locked my wife out of the house (she had stepped out to grab the dog--then a puppy--who had darted out after some kind of imaginary game) and went to the kitchen table to eat cookies without interference. My wife did not have a key handy, so she just watched him through the window. I returned home from work about ten minutes later, and I didn't know whether to be angry, proud, or flabbergasted.