"Dad, talk to me about science..."

He was born with a frown on his face, as if he was pissed at the world for having to come out of such a wonderful place and confront the cold reality ahead of him. He was our first child, so at the moment we had no idea of what was right and what could be wrong with him other than what his pediatrician would tell us. Of course, other than a bit of a suspect Apgar score of 8 out of 10, not much else was said at the time. Mom wanted to breastfeed him, but he simply would not latch on, making the experience extremely frustrating for her. She pumped instead, and fed it to him in bottles.

Eventually mom being a professional engineer wanted to get back to work and we found ourselves looking for daycare for our 3 month old baby. Unfortunately for us we did not have any close by family members that would help us, so in the beginning it was the same lady that had taken wonderful care of a close friends three children that took him in.

Soon we discovered that the person taking care of him was not as dependable as we hoped and found ourselves seeking daycare from what we thought would be more stable and professional sources. Nobody takes care of your child like you would, nobody. We learned that he was special in a way that was uncommon for most daycare providers. He did not like socializing with other children and typically only bonded with one person at a time at daycare. Once the person was not available for whatever reason (work change, hours changed, etc.), then it would take him a long time to feel right at daycare again, making it very difficult for the caregivers to deal with his closed in personality. In retrospect what he needed was his mom 100% of the time, not anyone else.

A few daycare facilities kicking our child out of their program and we soon find ourselves looking for a live in caregiver. Family members from out of state suggested a young lady that had also taken care of their kids in the past. We paid for her airplane ticket, arranged a room in our home, and went about spending a pretty big dollar amount in hopes to solve our situation. She was not perfect, nobody is, but at least he was getting one on one attention. This solution lasted almost a year when suddenly after her first vacation she decided to stay and not return without giving us much of a warning. In fact, my wife was out of town at that time and I took leave from work to care for my son for several weeks until she returned.

By now we had our second child, this one was born smiling! A more easy going child nobody could ask for. Not all was peachy though. Six months after his birth we had the scare of our lives. While taking him to a doctor's visit because of a day of constant crying and some fever, he was diagnosed with aseptic meningitis. It has been over 13 years since this incident, and I still remember it as if it was yesterday when they asked me to hold my six month old baby still while they performed a spinal tap! I still cringe at the thought of the long cold needle entering between his baby vertebrates and how much he cried. A few days in the hospital and things went back to normal with my younger boy.

In the meantime, finding ourselves again without a daycare provider I had a talk with my boss and was able to arrange my work schedule to just do it myself. My wife would leave to go to work by 5:30 a.m. and I would stay home taking care of the two boys. By 3:00 p.m. she would be back and I would then head out to start my work day. I'd almost always be back home just before midnight and would typically then get close to five hours of rest before starting my day all over again. I was able to do this for almost a full year, and by then my older son was finally in school and the younger one had a very easy time adapting to professional daycare.

In school, my older son did much better than at daycare, but little things always made it hard for him to adapt. For one, he desperately wanted to learn how to read so that he could understand all those cheat code books that he asked for his video games. We had purposely not taught him ourselves fearing that if he became too advanced, then he would be bored in school. He learned so quickly that by the beginning of first grade he had already read all of the Harry Potter books that were out at the time. His thirst for knowledge was insatiable and we bought him book after book which he devoured one after another without mercy. Soon I was getting library cards to reduce the cost of having to buy so many books. On one trip to the library he would check out ten or twelve books at a time which he would read all in less than two weeks time. It did not take long before nothing in the library would satisfy his hunger for reading and I found myself going to used book stores, swap meets, and garage sales hunting for more.

Of course we were super proud of this little knowledge sponge, but we were also conflicted because even though his abilities were obviously above average, his grades never really did reflect it. One complain after another would trickle in from his teachers with respect to his antisocial behaviour in class. In the early years he would make one, maybe two friends in his classroom and that was it. When one of his friends moved to another school, it was chaos in the friendship department. We soon learned that he did not have to study to learn something, all he had to do was read it once. So yes, we were right, school was boring and soon it started to show in his unwillingness to get out of bed in the mornings and go to school.

It was first grade when we realized that something was truly out of place with his obsessiveness. On one of the trips to find books in garage sales, he got his mom to buy him a college level biology book. He carried that bulky textbook everywhere he went. In school his teacher got upset and took it away from him. When his mom picked him up after school she noticed he was walking around with his index and thumb in a wierd position as if pinching imaginary salt. She asked him, and he simply said that he was carrying his book. Mind you, there was no book there anymore since it had been taken away by his teacher much earlier during the day.

Typically I was the one that would take one to daycare and the other to school so that my wife could get in early enough to pick them up in the afternoon after work. On my way to school he would always say "Dad, talk to me about science." I am also an engineer and an avid physics and astrophysics reader. I know, this is pretty nerdy of me, but that is who I am. So, one subject at a time I would spend the 15 minute drive to school talking to my boy about something interesting that I had read in one of my books. He would suck it all in and ask question after question on the subjects. Relativity, time dialation, black holes, event horizons, singularities, subatomic particles, the uncertainty principle, and dozens of other subjects became the daily subject of our drive to school. I knew then, just as I know now, that this boy was special in ways that are probably imposible to measure. He always scored between 98 and 100 percentile in all of his standardized testings. Soon I found myself running out of things to teach him and going back to reading more books to be able to satisfy his hunger.

Time has passed and the child became a boy and the boy a teenager whom is soon to become a man. Reading is still one of his passions which I encourage every chance I can. In fact, he has now read many of my own books from which I would spend hours teaching him from. Every once in a while we are still able to connect and "talk about science."