Placeholder while article actions are loading
Soon after their daughter Isla turned 2, Amanda and Jason McNabb began noticing strange configurations of plastic, multicolored toy letters around their suburban Louisville house.
Next to a chair: CHAIR
And near the Amazon Fire Stick remote: a TV
Even Booger couldn’t recognize himself. Next to the McNabs family tabby they found another set of the now familiar block letters, this time spelling out CAT.
The culprit: their toddler. Ayla’s colorful subtitles prompted her parents to test her IQ in May, when she was approaching 2½, McNabs told The Washington Post. By the end of the month, they had the results: Isla was in the top 1 percent of the population. Her performance qualified her for membership in Mensa, an organization of people who score in the top 2 percent on IQ tests.
This makes her one of the youngest Mensa members in the country. In 2019, Mensa America spokesman Charles Brown, while talking about a 2-year-old from Texas who became a member of the organization, said the boy was one of three members under the age of 4 and one of 56 under the age of 6.
“It’s out of 50,000 members,” Brown told WFAA.
Isla McNabb, a 2-year-old member of Mensa, said words like “excited” and “rainbow” from flash cards on June 30. (Video: Amanda McNabb)
As for Isla, her father Jason McNabb, 43, said there were several times in the early years of his daughter’s life when the hair on the back of his neck stood on end – what he called “creepy moments” that made him made him think something extraordinary was happening.
But they became more than fleeting moments and gut feelings by the time she turned 2 in November. Isla had an affinity for the alphabet and called out the letters herself. So her mom and dad—an auditor and dentist, respectively—got her a tablet as a birthday present. After writing down a few letters, Jason demonstrated to Isla how to pronounce them. Wondering if she could put these letters together, he wrote the word “red.”
“She sounded it and said ‘Red,'” Jason said.
The McNabs tried “blue,” followed by “yellow,” and then “purple.” Isla caught them all. Then her mother thought of one thing she was sure would puzzle her daughter: “orange.”
“No way,” Amanda, 38, told The Post, recalling what she was thinking at the time.
“Everything we threw at her, she just seemed to pick it up right away,” Jason said. “It was amazing.”
The McNabs then continue to teach her new words. She could almost always phonetically pronounce the letters until she could read the word. Her parents started keeping a list. When they started, Isla’s vocabulary was around 100 words. It quickly grew to 200. They stopped counting at 500.
“She can only read now,” Amanda said.
At a doctor’s appointment a few months ago, the McNabs told the pediatrician that Isla could read. The doctor assumed they meant she had memorized stories her parents had told her over and over. Jason and Amanda then directed Isla to a poster in the doctor’s office about the dangers of leaving babies alone on the exam table. Isla read every word.
“Oh! She can Read itsaid the pediatrician.
Isla’s learning wasn’t limited to reading, which most kids start doing around 6 or 7. She started counting and then suddenly started doing it backwards. She can do simple math, including subtraction. One day, Amanda keeps Isla busy by giving her some crayons and an empty Amazon box. She noticed that Isla had written MOM – or a solid approximation, given her lack of motor skills. Reading evolved into writing.
Amanda researched psychologists who administered intelligence tests and found one in Lexington, just over an hour’s drive from their home. He told her he doesn’t usually test children under 4. But intrigued by her claims, he made an exception. Isla’s scores on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, which were reviewed by The Post, rated her as “superior” or “very superior” in all categories.
She ranked in the 99th percentile.
Although she is intelligent, Isla is also a normal little child. She likes Bluey, an Australian cartoon about a blue heeler dog, and Blippi, a YouTube children’s show that her father describes as a “modern-day Pee-wee Herman.” She started preschool last month and is obsessed with making friends and her teacher Miss Abigail. She also enjoys doing puzzles and playing outside.
“Normal kid stuff,” her mother said, adding that Isla was, of course, a fan of reading and the library.
A few of Ayla’s favorite books: the Pete the Cat series and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, which teaches kids the alphabet. It does so by telling a story about a coconut tree that collapses after all 26 letters climb it.
Isla recreated the book’s climax by stuffing her block letters into Booger’s cat tree and then knocking it over to make the letters scatter, her parents said. “We do this several times a day,” Amanda added with the exasperated tone and look unique to parents of young children.
Isla McNabb, 2, of Crestwood, Kentucky, read “Pete the Cat” aloud to her parents on June 30. (Video: Amanda McNabb)
Her parents are tired. Initially concerned that Isla was not getting enough sleep, the psychologist who tested her informed the McNabs that it was normal for highly intelligent children to sleep less. They were relieved that their daughter was healthy, but not excited about the prospect of her continuing to wake them up at 4 a.m.
“It’s a little disheartening for us,” her mother said.
Amanda said she was sure of one thing. Although she was eager to get her daughter tested and thrilled with the results, she wouldn’t follow suit. “I tell people I’m not going to get tested,” she said.
“I can’t let her know she’s smarter than me.”
Add Comment