I met an oddity the other day: The mother of a child whose development was not extraordinarily accelerated as an infant.
You almost never encounter this. In fact, I didn’t even know it existed. Every mom I’ve ever met had children that were walking in the womb and reading at a fifth grade level by the time they got home from the hospital.
But apparently, this woman’s son sat up when he was supposed to, rolled over when he was supposed to, started walking and talking and stealing and slashing tires exactly in accordance with the schedule peddled to all first-time mothers-to-be by their gynos for as long as people have been depositing these mewling cabbages on the surface of this godforsaken mudball.
I always figured that timeline was a little white lie, to be honest – a vast gynecological conspiracy to bolster new mothers’ self esteem by skewing the numbers. If the kid’s supposed to pick his nose at 3 to 4 months, tell them 4 to 5 months, that sort of thing, which would explain why every breeder I’ve ever met produced some wunderkind capable of doing things far ahead of his or her peers.
Or maybe I just know people with superior DNA. Equal chance to each, I think.
In any case, it was a short-lived oddity. She quickly shattered the illusion by describing her daughter’s development, who was a preemie but nonetheless began walking far ahead of schedule in order to get the hell away from her older brother, who apparently has an arm like Randy Johnson and a temper like Dick Cheney on a Senate floor.

Sigh.