How young is to old??

This morning I realized that my son..my almost NINE..(GAH!! I cringe when I have to say that!!) year old son is so old. And I don't mean OLD like HE. IS. ALMOST. NINE. I mean old like...talking to him sometimes is like talking to a peer of my own. He has a massive vocabulary. He reads on a 6th grade level..he is so mathematically advanced that he is learning algebra. But intelligence is NOT what I am talking about.

I mean old. Like brings home books on World War 2 old. When other 3rd graders are checking out Captain Underpants or Harry Potter books...my son is checking out War books and history books or space books or weather books. He uses our DVR to record shows like Modern Marvels, Mega Disasters, or Lock N Load. When other kids are parking in front of Spongebob Square pants or Phineas and Ferb, Jayden is watching these shows instead. It's odd.

I guess I should have known when he began speaking words at 9 months old. By a year, he was speaking in sentences. He would sit for hours if he were being read to. He seemed to soak up knowledge and understand things far beyond his age. When he was tired, he'd put himself down for a nap. NO JOKE (imagine our surprise when his sister was born and we realized that our son was not the "norm") At 3, he was putting together puzzles...NOT the wooden puzzles, but real puzzles with like 25+ pieces. This is the child that begged for an alarm clock at the age of four so that he could get up to see some TV show...transformers, I think it was. We got him one and he began to set it himself. Now that he's in school, he continues to use it and NEVER ONCE have I had to get him up for school..even in Kindergarten. So it seemed that from birth, this child was an old soul.

So, when he started expressing interest in watching more grown up tv shows...like CSI or Criminal Minds...we were unsure of what to do. He's mature enough to understand that while death is real and sometimes bad things do happen, everything on these shows are FAKE. However, because he's still has the emotions of a almost 9 yr old child and because we have been very selective about what he is exposed to, the adult nature of the content could cause undue stress on him. We don't really want to NOT expose him to things, though and knowing the maturity level of our child, we cautiously began to allow him to start watching a few episodes that were not to gory or overtly sexual. All episodes that my husband or I had screened before hand. (Thanks DVR!!)

This morning, over breakfast, we were chatting about CSI episode he recently watched and how some of the stuff on it is cool. I was trying to get him to discuss some of the more troubling aspects of it...such as I don't know..DEATH and MURDER. He, however, was more interested in the problem solving aspect of it.

"You know?" he said. "I really like CSI. It's like I SPY but only in real life."

I had to laugh. Great Comparison, Son. Great comparison.

And then he precedes to get up from the table and turn on the TV. "Son" I say. "You know that we don't watch TV before school"

"I know" he says. "I'm just checking the weather to see what I should wear today. If the noise is going to bother you, would you rather that I look it up on the computer?"

See?? OLD!