Very talented, very different

Mister and Pumpkin are super smart. In different ways. Mister is very creative. He loves to color, draw pictures, dress up in costume and role-play, etc. And he's very good at it. I've saved a few of his better drawings and they just blow me away. I mean, it's not VanGogh or anything, but for a 6 year old I think he's got remarkable talent. This morning he drew the words "truck", "duck" and "dog" in the style of Word World. Where the words are shaped like their meanings. So he wrote each one out in block letters and decorated them to make truck look like a truck, with a tow hook on the back and everything. Dog looked like a dog, with ears, paws, tail, face, etc. And duck looked like a duck. I was super impressed. He will act out entire scenes from movies with me. He's memorized a bunch of scenes from various movies (and since I've also seen them a zillion times I know how they go too) and we'll role play together. He can spend huge chunks of time happily drawing up elaborate scenes (all on our good computer paper, naturally, since it doesn't have lines to mess up the look of his picture). Pumpkin does one scribble across the page and calls it a day. Mister's creativity really amazes me, especially because I have no idea where he got it from. Neither Scott nor I are the least bit artistic or creative like he is.

Pumpkin is very logical and methodical. Learning is his favorite game. He's known all his letters since he was 21 months old and he's known all their sounds since he was just over 2. He loves to read and has a few books memorized to the point that he can "read" them to himself, literally word for word. Yesterday he told me that he wanted to "build a puzzle" (which is his cute way of saying it), so I got out his new Thomas the Train puzzle and set it out on the counter for him. I didn't have time to help him with it b/c I was tending to Mister and Baby Bear, but when I came back to check on him he was halfway done and he'd done it all by himself. I was in total shock, so I sat there and watched as he finished the rest by himself. He was so proud of himself he undid it all and did it again. And it's not like this was a puzzle he's done a bunch of times before. This was the first time he'e ever done this particular one. He is very logical and doesn't give up easily. Puzzles frustrate Mister to no end and he has zero patience for them. Pumpkin just keeps plugging away. When a piece doesn't fit, he keeps trying them out until they do, and rotating them in different directions to see if they fit that way.

I'm just amazed at how differently they process things and what they are drawn to, and I'll be interested to see where Baby Bear's interests lie when he gets to be a bit older.