Baby, I'm amazed

Andrew is just so smart sometimes that it's scary. But it's not just "smart" in the traditional sense, even though he is..........it's the things he notices, things he remembers and thinks of, even days/weeks/years after the fact. He still manages to surprise me, though, even after all this time.

For several months now, he's been in a phase of posting signs all over the house, for various reasons. Some have been politically oriented (he's a Hillary fan, sadly), or lists of favorite things (foods, colors), or holiday greetings (we've still got Happy Easter in the living room, and I took down Merry Christmas not too long ago).

But a couple of weeks ago, he came home from school one day obsessed with the idea of making our own, in-home, art museum. I didn't really understand what he meant or envisioned---then he got out the sign-making paper. Next thing I know, I saw this:


...which was hanging on the hallway wall near his room.

The home art museum was to have a Masterpiece Exhibit (gotta love his 1st grade spelling!), a Sculpture Exhibit and a Pointillism Exhibit (he spells it "pointalisam"). Later that night, he made "sculptures" out of playdoh, and he and I drew some fair examples of pointillism. The masterpiece exhibits are TBA at this point. I asked him where he'd learned about this stuff, especially pointillism......was it in art class at school? (he goes to an arts-infused school, so it's not out of the realm of possibility) But he said he'd learned those words on the Jump Start Artist CD-rom computer game that we gave him. How many 6 year olds do you think are talking about pointillism and explaining what it is to their mom? (his version: it's a picture made out of tiny, tiny dots. Pretty good explanation, huh?) But these huge words and "out there" concepts just seem to soak into him........he retains them and then they pop back out when you least expect it. If you ask him who he sat with at lunch today, however, you'll probably hear "I don't know". That's what is so freakin' frustrating about the autism spectrum. Well, it's ONE of the frustrating things.