(Disclaimer: The following post is not even remotely unbiased.
It's written by a mommy who thinks her kid is the best person in the world.)
Amelia truly astounds me every day by the things she knows and does.
This girl has a memory like nothing I've ever seen. Maybe all little kids have this kind of memory... but I like to think Amelia is just a super genius. Hey, I'm allowed to be subjective. I'm the mom.
My parents came for a quick one-night visit as they pass through on their way to a Florida vacation. They used Valentine's Day as an excuse to spoil Amelia with even more gifts and toys. And non-stop attention.
One of Amelia's new gifts was a set of picture/letter flash cards. A for apple, B for bee, C for car - 52 in all, with uppercase and lowercase letters. I was going through the deck one by one, showing Amelia all the pictures. At 22 months old, she already knew a word for almost every single picture! She got maybe 10 wrong out of the whole deck.
In rapid-fire succession, Amelia yelled out "airplane! apple! bee! cat! car! girl! house! octopus! spider! tree!", and so on. That alone impressed the heck out of me. I knew Amelia had a lot of words already, but hearing her spout them off one by one and attach them to a correct picture was awesome.
There were several she didn't know. Like queen. Or pear. Or kite. I told her those words. Then she played this game all over again with her grandma. We cheered her on with every correct word and repeated for a second time the ones she did not know.
A couple hours later, as we were eating dinner together, Amelia started saying "queen! pear! kite!", etc. She repeated several of the new words we'd taught her earlier that evening. And when we got home, she played with the flashcards again - and got even more correct than she had before. She absolutely, without a doubt, knows at least 5 brand new words! And she learned them after seeing the picture and hearing the word only twice. Her memory and ability to learn quickly is really fascinating.
I think she's brilliant. :)