Celebrating Unusual Interests

[jerigirl]

DS1 (6.5) was obsessed with the technicalities of trains for a long time. Though now it is Origami. It started with a few paper airplane books (Klutz and similar) and then he found a few Youtube channels and it has taken off from there. Any piece of paper that comes into this house is immediately folded into something if I don't get it first! LOL!

[Gena]

It's fun to read what everyone's kids are interested in!

Would your son like to come over and organize batteries (and heck, the whole house!) for me? That's awesome.

I'm sure DS would love to go to other people's houses and organize their batteries (just the batteries - not the whole house). Maybe I can hire him out!

DS1 (6.5) was obsessed with the technicalities of trains for a long time. Though now it is Origami. It started with a few paper airplane books (Klutz and similar) and then he found a few Youtube channels and it has taken off from there. Any piece of paper that comes into this house is immediately folded into something if I don't get it first! LOL!

That's so cool. Your DS must have great fine motor skills!!

[hellokitty]

DS1 is my, "quirky" child. He would probably ring up on the spectrum if we pursued testing. Several of his odd interests, where he is basically like a little professor about these topics are:

-Squids and cuttlefish He njoys learning about them and enjoys eating squid too, lol. He's finally outgrown this phase.

-Jellyfish He can pretty much identify any jellyfish that he sees and there are a lot of different types!

-Hagfish Never heard of them, have you? Neither did his 3rd grade teacher. That is what he did his recent 3rd grade science project on and thank goodness for being able to use the internet as a resource, b/c the library had ZERO books on hagfish and we happened to have ONE book in our own household about hagfish that we were able to cite.

-Parasites of any kind, he especially loves images taken from electron microscopes. His favorite is to talk about parasites at the dinner table, blech. Anyway, he is obsessed with them, esp tapeworms. Every yr, the kindergarten teachers put together a mother's day cookbook, with a recipe from each dictated from student. I knew it must have been interesting, b/c when I went to pick him up from half day K, some of the other parents came up and told me that my son's recipe was the best one in the class, lol. Here is a copy and paste of his recipe from kindergarten (he's now in 3rd grade)...

Perfectly Cooked Peanut Butter & Jelly
By: XXXX

"My mom gets her ingredients at the supermarket. First she takes in the bags and put them in the refrigerator. She puts in two pieces of bread. Then she gets some peanut butter, just one scoop. then she gently spreads it around my bread. Then she gets the jelly, just one scoop. Then she spreads it carefully on my peanut butter. It just takes an hour and a half to cook. She doesn't use the oven. It will just be cold. Cold food gets tapeworms, and tapeworm eggs turn into tapeworms. They have hooks on their mouth. Tapeworms are parasites. Tapeworms are especially dangerous. I know when it is ready to eat when it's done. It tastes like peanut butter and jelly because of the sweetness and peanutty-ess. I like peanuts so much!"

Oh and he's also obsessed with pokemon, like I have never run into another kid with such a pkemon obsession before. It's not about playing the game so much (he plays on his nintendo DS, but not with his cards,), but about learning all the details of the different card characters. He will try to talk to everyone about pokemon.

He is also obsessed with one of my brother's old college books called, "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History." We're not talking about a book full of little snippets of info and a wealth of pictures, the pictures in the book are mostly black and white drawings and diagrams and it is technical type of reading, my eyes just glaze over when I peek in the book. It is a very dry book and he actually reads it. He found the book in my brother's old room at my parents' place and asked if he could have it (my brother was ok with it) and even after several yrs, he still pulls it out and reads it. He brought it for show and tell in first grade several times, lol. I cannot even imagine what his classmtes were thinking when he told them how awesome the book was. However, he ties into his fascination with prehistoric ocean creatures. His teacher was very good though about trying to cater to his interests, she even gave him a couple of jellyfish books that she happened to come across, when he had moved onto 2nd grade, even though he was no longer her student, since she said she knew he'd love them and she loved hearing him talk about stuff like that.

He's also a lego nut, but unlike most kids who try to make huge creations, he makes what I call micro-legos. He loves using the tiniest legos to make little robots and creatures. It's actually really cool that he can use so few and such small pieces to make something in a very simplistic way. However, I get annoyed that we literally have thousands of lego and he usually just makes these really tiny things with them, lol.

DS2 is pretty run of the mill, but two of his interests that are kind of odd are his fascination with fish and fishing. He could spend all day on you-tube just watching videos about fish. He talks about different types of fish all of the time too. He also loves origami, and is pretty good at it, even the more complicated origami, I have to say that I'm impressed with his skill. Another weird interest is weapons. He is obsessed with weapons, I honestly don't know why, but sometimes dh and I joke that maybe he will grow up to develop weapons. My other two kids really show no interest in the technical aspects of weapons, just ds2. DS2 also likes trying to teach himself to write in cursive. He is only in first grade and I'm not sure if our district even teachs cursive anymore, so I think this is kind of a funny, but cool interest.

DS3 is just crazy and he seems to be an expert at annoying DS2, lol.

[mikeys_mom]

What a great topic!

DS has Aspergers. His interests are;

Trains - He knows about all different trains around the world and why they are special, particularly the high-speed ones. He also knows all about the mechanisms behind a steam engine and diesel train. Most of the books he reads are either technical adult ones or the DK series ones aimed at much older kids. There is a train museum near my parents and we must plan to go there everytime we visit them or he gets disapointed that he didn't get to go talk with the train guys there. I really think he has more fun conversing with the adults who work there than actually seeing the trains.

Airplanes - He was been reading up on the Wright brothers and that lead to learning all about the evolution of flight as well as the various jets owned by the different commercial airlines. Thankfully DH enjoys planes as well so the two of them can happily chat about them together for very long periods of time.

Volcanoes and earthquakes - This has been a passion of his since he was 3 years old. He has several books on the topic and will reread them many times. He loves talking about this topic with anyone who shows any interest.

Dominos - This is a new one. He watches youtube videos of various domino configurations that people setup and then tries to create his own all across the house.

Roller coasters - He can tell you the specifications of lots of different rollercoasters - max speed, track length, year it was built. He has planned an itinerary of the ones he wants to visit. Not sure how that will play out but we will see...

[karstmama]

Consider coming to the outer banks to see the wright brothers memorial at kitty hawk one vacation!

[Sweetum]

Perfectly Cooked Peanut Butter & Jelly
By: XXXX

"My mom gets her ingredients at the supermarket. First she takes in the bags and put them in the refrigerator. She puts in two pieces of bread. Then she gets some peanut butter, just one scoop. then she gently spreads it around my bread. Then she gets the jelly, just one scoop. Then she spreads it carefully on my peanut butter. It just takes an hour and a half to cook. She doesn't use the oven. It will just be cold. Cold food gets tapeworms, and tapeworm eggs turn into tapeworms. They have hooks on their mouth. Tapeworms are parasites. Tapeworms are especially dangerous. I know when it is ready to eat when it's done. It tastes like peanut butter and jelly because of the sweetness and peanutty-ess. I like peanuts so much!"

At the risk of sounding foolish, ignorant, and paranoid, does penaut butter and jelly sandwich need to be "cooked"? How? does it really get tapeworms if not? I am really scared of tapeworms since one of my friends had it and it messed his life bad sorry, this is OT...
but again, this from a kindergartner? wow! really good descrtipion skills.

[VClute]

Fear not. You get tapeworms from eating tapeworm eggs, found in poo. So don't make your pb&j with poo or hands that have been in poo and not washed and you should be fine.

[hillview]

music. lyrics. the exact words in say gangnam style. the dance to specific music (like watch the videos and make thoes exact moves at that time). He has (likely) NLD so this makes sense to some degree.

[hellokitty]

Fear not. You get tapeworms from eating tapeworm eggs, found in poo. So don't make your pb&j with poo or hands that have been in poo and not washed and you should be fine.

Lol, I am so glad that he didn't include the part about the poo...

[Sweetum]

LOL thanks for that!