My Sorta Savant: She'll Put a Spell On You

I've been seeing a lot of blog posts lately about what people should and shouldn't say to parents of children with autism.  One of the "don'ts" was asking which savant-like talent your autistic child has.  I considered how I would react if I was asked that question, and I think that I would be less offended than worried that they were casing out kids to stuff into a sack and take to Vegas.

I think that the closest Audrey comes to having a savant-caliber ability is her spelling.  She is a crazy kick-ass speller.  I'm not entirely ready to chalk this up to autism, however.  You see, I was the 2nd grade spelling champ for my archdiocese back in the day.  It ain't bragging if it's true yo.

Audrey's special talent will, unfortunately, not make us rich anytime soon.  But it has over the years become a bit of a party game.  I can remember going as far back as when she was just 2...she could barely even say a few words, but she could spell like nobody's business.

Recently, my in-laws were visiting from out of town and started asking her to spell words.  They started with words like "grandpa" and "wine". (Editor's note: These are two completely random words, and this is not to insinuate that they go together in any way.  In summary:  Random words.  Not insinuating.  Not at all.)  

What I got when I searched on
"spelling trophies" in Google images

Pfft.  Those words were like batting practice for her.  They escalated to words with silent letters and whatever you call those letter combinations that make some unphonetic sound like "laugh", "spaghetti", and "telephone".  I mean, it's not like she can spell onomatopoeia or anything.  (Editor's note:  I had to look that up.)  But she can spell a lot of words that you wouldn't think she could.

She'll bring spelling worksheets home from school and they are most always 100%.  One time she had one marked wrong and I honestly could not figure out why.  I thought that there'd been a mistake and they were just trying to make the other kids feel better about themselves.  The word was artic.  As in cold.  It's apparently supposed to have another "c" in there somewhere.  Whatevs.  It's not like she'll be writing the word articc very often.

Sometimes she walks around the house spelling and I'm not really paying attention and, even if I am, I'm way too brain dead to figure it out.  One day I actually started writing down the letters and she was spelling "tobacco executive".  Really.

The only thing that I could figure was that she is some sort of hired assassin for an anti-corporate extremist group which at some point abducted her, embedded a microchip in her brain, and sent her signals for who was to be her next target.  Either that or she saw it on TV in a political ad.  One of those.