"Savant" Qualities??

I like to watch the movie "Rain Man" from time to time.  If you've never seen the movie, it's about a man with Autism that has spent the bulk of his life in an institution.  My favorite parts of the movie are where he shows his "savant" type qualities like memorizing entire pages of a phone book or counting toothpicks that fall on the floor.  I have had more than one person ask me if Dominic is a "savant." I've wondered the same thing myself sometimes.  I do know that he can take a bunch of Legos that look like this:

And turn it into this:

Dominic has been using the computer since he was very young.  What we discovered a few months ago is that he will go into YouTube, find what he wants to build and then will build it.  He figured out all on his own how to access YouTube with absolutely no help from us.  No matter how many times I offered to do an educational CD-ROM with him, the answer most of the time was no.  Dominic is strong-willed like the rest of us in this family and he likes to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it  :)  Even this morning - I asked him to make a chair for the piano above and it took him probably 30 minutes to make it.  I should have just left him alone and let him make it himself.  He has Lego kits geared towards his age and he can put those together in minutes.  Dominic also loves puzzles.  I have talked in prior blog posts about him doing 500 piece puzzles.

The one in the background he did already by himself.  The one he was working on was before he went to school one morning.  The thing of it is, both of these puzzles were mixed together.  He found which pieces went to which puzzle and if any pieces were missing.  He bugged me one day for hours asking for a few pieces that were missing from one of these puzzles.  I had to keep telling him I think they were lost.  It took him a few days before he understood that and would continue making the puzzle.  He kept telling me, "puzzle piece missing!"  Dominic also has ADHD which makes him sitting for hours and doing his Legos or puzzles even more remarkable.  Over the weekend, I was sitting with him at the kitchen table helping him do his homework.  He sat just long enough to finish it and then ran back to the computer to work on another Lego project!!!!