Seriously. She was with me at "the largest cake decorating store in Hamilton, Ohio " (That Cannot Be Named) today and we were looking at different eyelet cutters and she says, "Those cutters are these cutters combined, why don't you just get these 4 and you can make these other 5 with them and save money?" I had actually just thought the exact same thing!

Then she is looking at these little baby jumper cutters with me and I was wanting a onesie as well and a little dress, but they were out, so she says, "You can cut this one, then use a circle cutter to cut the legs off and make it a onesie." DUH! Why didn't I think of that? It made me think of how to make the other one a dress, too. And saved me $14!

And then a little while ago, I was making hydrangeas for a cake next week and I don't have a center mold, so we look to see what it looks like, and she says, "You can make that by making a little ball and flattening it, and dragging lines into it, like in a cross."  I was thinking of making one out of 4 dragees dropped in the center, but that will look better because it will match and I can dust it!

She looks at people's cakes on... um, the internet... over my shoulder and says, "that looks horrible, you could do that so much better after getting sloppy on coffee or beer" (She had never seen me drink BTW, I drink a wine cooler a month to every 6 months or so.) "Why are these people saying this cake looks good when it is terrible? Are they lying, or blind or stupid or something?" I know, right? "It is a form of lying called "being polite" we should try it sometime."

I click on a link to a cake and when it pops up, she asks, "Is that made with the rose tip?" Why, yes it is!

And then I am winding down, looking at youtube tutorials on the Marvelous Mold Onlays and such, and the then we start looking at other videos by other artists and  she says, "What is this girl doing making a tutorial? She sucks at this!" And she really did. We are scrolling through dozens we aren't interested in and she says, "Do people really need tutorials to do every single thing?" Why, yes they do sweetheart, so many of them are completely helpless...

I can't wait until she is grown so we can be friends, and I don't have to be the Mean Mommy, telling her what to do. She is Mini Me, and we have a blast and think just alike, lol. She is such a doll, I am going to try to lead her in the right direction, so she doesn't have to make the stupid mistakes I have made. She is already better at cake than I was when I was 13, and I started at her age. (But I was talking about other poor choice I made that weren't cake related, lol)

Anybody else have kids with loads of common sense, smarter than many of your peers?

ALooool!!! That is so sweet,by the sound of it she sounds so clued up that I don't think she'll be making many mistakes!! My 4 yr old nephew is so cheeky, he's so imaginative- somebody needed help for a Minnie mouse cake and Thomas the tank engine combined, she wanted the train but wanted to incorporate minnies ears in there some how. So I ask my family for some tips to which they're all hmming and aaahing to and he comes out with "why don't you tell her to use Minnies ears for Thomas's train wheels?" I was so surprised I felt so proud!

AMy niece is a smart kid. Her vocabulary is higher than most "adults" I know.

There are 2 kids in this world that wouldn't make me want to stay off the road when they start driving. One is my brothers daughter (the smarty pants; she's also the spitting image of me) and the other is my husband's brothers daughter. They are also the only kids that I will babysit (I use the term babysit loosely as one is 15 [old enough to stay home by herself] and the other is 9).

I love it!!  My daughter is 10 and has actually "fixed" a few problems for me by saying similar things, "well, why don't you try xyz"..."oh, huh, yeah, awesome!".  I call her my little problem solver.  

AI've got one of those kids that is incredibly smart, yet has absolutely no common sense whatsoever. I'm amazed that she actually remembers to breathe most days. She scores in the top 1% nationally in most of her school testing, but she can't remember what drawer the forks are in.

AGENIUS ALERT!!!!!

AOur two year old daughter is demonstrating incredible skills in spatial reasoning with her building blocks, I'm having my parents ship my old Lego sets from their house so she can get started with smaller blocks and the Technic sets with motors/gears/etc.

When she starts school my wife and I are going to supplement her education with homeschool lessons, since most public schools don't cover things like rhetoric, logic, civics, business, psychology, engineering, and building up EQ. The hard part has been finding existing secular homeschool materials so we'll probably end up making our own lessons.

AThese are sweet stories. I am just happy that my one year old stops and pauses when she hears "no".

We send our kindergartener to the Russian School of Mathematics, which hopefully will enrich her math skills.  She's still too little to call me out on things...LOL

AAs soon as you are ready to work on reading skills, I would suggest Barton reading and spelling, it was technically designed for dyslexia and other reading/ spelling disorders, but can be substituted in a homeschool setting as the reading/spelling curriculum. My 8 yo dd has an iq of 119 but really struggles with phonemic awareness, we started Barton, and in just under 6 months she is at an early 4 th grade reading level. So I think as a starting tool for a young child just learning to read it would give a strong advantage when they start school.

AThe above was meant in response to Jason, my quotes didn't take

I think I will look for Barton out my way, it sounds excellent!

AThanks for the suggestion on Barton. It looks like it might be a good option as a last resort, but from what I've seen it shouldn't be too difficult to build lesson plans from publicly available material focusing on phonemic awareness. It's a little early to start introducing that concept now but we will probably bring it into rotation around age 4.

I learned there are 2 things which will help your children learn (in school or out) more than anything else: 

1) DO NOT EVER speak baby talk to them.  They learn language by what they hear.  Don't "dumb things down" for them, either.  They'll have a larger vocabulary if you use the big words and explain the meaning if they can't figure it out themselves.

2) Get them reading as early as possible.  Once they figure out that anything they want to know can be found in books or online, there will be no stopping them. 

I was always so proud on Parents' Night when teachers would gush over my kiddos' vocabulary - from kindergarten on.  A high school senior English teacher told me once that she wished her students had the vocabulary my 10-year-old had. (OK - bragging done.)