chair, couch, tv. Put together from blocks of letters, words like these are suddenly lying around in the living room of the McNabb family from the US state of Kentucky – and nobody knows why. The search for clues does not lead to an ambassador from a distant galaxy, nor to a secretly organized Scrabble regulars’ table, which is why there is only one other option: That must have been Isla, the only two-and-a-half-year-old daughter of the house.
Her parents must have been only moderately taken aback by this realization, after all Isla read words to them beforehand. Now they wanted to know more about it and sent them to a kind of IQ test that is usually only carried out at an older age. Due to the evidence that can now be spelled out, it was probably urgent. The result: Isla is smarter than 99 percent of her peers, which in turn allows her to join Mensa, an association for extraordinarily smart people. Now she is the youngest member there.
In the Washington Post the parents said they were relieved that Isla was otherwise quite ordinary. She likes cartoon series, she likes puzzles and goes to daycare with her peers, where she makes new friends. And yet she is always somehow present with her special comprehension of vocabulary. For secret agreements, the parents therefore have to fall back on something that is still unattainable even for highly gifted two-year-olds: If their daughter really doesn’t notice something, the father and mother write messages to each other on their cell phones.
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