TRISHA - In the beginning

Trisha was a gifted child. I heard whisperings around the ward. Finally a mom whose child attended the same neighborhood preschool shared everything the preschool teacher had shared it her. (It always bugged me that I was the last to know that my daughter was gifted.) Being our first child...we thought it was normal.

 The Challenger School wasn't a huge challenge for Trisha. She grasped the reading concept very quick...and ran with it. Her grami spied her reading the encyclopedia many times. When in kindergarten it became obvious that she was going to be bored out of her head. She was reading on a 7th grade level. Having an October birthday made Trisha one of the oldest in her class. I made appointment after appointment with the principal. Mrs. Tripp didn't believe in letting students skip grades...THIS MEANT WAR! I was told that because of Trisha's size she was too small to skip and that every mother thinks her child is brilliant. 

It took me months of duking it out with the principal. I finally convinced the administration to test her... "OH, SHE IS EXTREMELY BRIGHT"...no kidding! At that point she was pushed into 1st grade. She skipped 1/2 of kindergarten and 1/2 of first grade. She fit in nicely and loved every minute of it.

Fast-forward, we knew that driving and dating would become an issue, she went from being the oldest in her class to being the youngest. We were right. We didn't have the heart to make her take drivers ed with sophomores when she was a junior. We paid for her to take private driving lessons. We did let her attend dances before her 16th birthday, other than that, no dating.

She always received fantastic grades. Trisha had a wide range of friends, most of them were Hispanic Her Spanish was remarkable. She loved the fact that we had no clue what they were saying...unless it was swearing, we could tell when the conversation went south.

Graduating from high school at 17 came with it's own set of problems. (But that is another story, another day.)