Smart Kid

One of my spare-time hobbies is designing houses. When I was 8 or 9 years old, I was pretty certain that I was going to grow up to be an architect. I never became an architect, but I still love to fill my spare hours designing houses. I've got about 6 or 7 in my portfolio, each one taking about 200 to 300 hours to finish (the first draft that is, redesigns taking slightly less time). All of them are probably award-winning designs if somebody besides me ever saw them.

So with my vacation time, I sat down with Corel Draw and put in the last 20 hours on my most recent design.

Pot came in as I was doing the final bits and pieces of landscape ideas by moving crude green blobs that represent trees around the amorphous blue blob representing a fish pond.

"I like big trees next to the water," he said. "What is that? A table?" he said, pointing to the orange circle with four crescent circles around it.

He knew from before that I was working on a house on my computer for the last couple of days, but I had never explained to him what any of the lines, colors, or shapes actually meant. Grasping the concept of abstract design from an abstract point of view (i.e. looking straight down into a ceiling-less room) on a 2-dimensional field and interpreting the reality it represents is, I assume, pretty good for a 4-year-old.

I tested him, and he was able to find the beds (orange rectangles with another orange rectangle representing a pillow), but unable to find the cars in the garage (3 large grey rectangles side by side). He didn't get the windows (gray rectangles set in the black line of the wall) on the first try, but did on the second dry. I didn't know how to say stairs in Thai, so I don't know if he got those right or not, but he seemed pretty certain on what he was saying.

Pui says that Pot is quite intelligent, but I'm not sure how many mothers would label their kids even "average", so I didn't give it much thought, but I have yet to observe Pot (with my limited grasp of what he is saying) do anything that I would consider stupid for his age. That, added to his observations of my design this morning, certainly make me think that he's no mental midget.