I did not read the other responses, because I can imagine if they prompted your response that they would make me very angry, having a child with a cognative and developmental disablity myself.
IQ is one of those things that you can facilitate only to the point that they are capable. While you can create mental retardation by limiting stimulation to an extreem paucity, you cannot gain mental capacity beyond the capcity avaliable already via enrichment. High intelectual acheivement is either possible, or not possilbe, and an minimally enriched environment can and does still allow children to reach a high acheivment status. All you can say right now at age 2 is that your son may have the ablity to learn quickly and beyond his expected development. You have zero knowledge at this point if his excelleration will continue, but you should know that for more than 90% of early accelorated learners, the early gains will be gone by the time they enter the 4th grade. Young minds are elastic, but true giftedness in not identifiable until that time. He may be, but you should also know that the disapointment of many children and parents when they realize that their child is more average than they thought is hard to mediate once the child has taken on the monker of "gifted" themselves. I see this as an educational advocate, I have been contacted to help kids who do not qualify into gifted programs. Not a good idea, and very sad for these kids.
Lining things up, however, is not a function of IQ. It is a funciton of development and organizational preference. When preference becomes a barrier to learning or a ridgid factor that interferes with everyday life, it deserves to be evaluated along with other developmental aspects. It does not sound like this is a big issue for your son, at least from your perpective. I would question you about why you are so defensive about it though, and if that was the only ignorant comment you got about autism, I do not see why you would even ask your pediatrian; it seems reactionary to me, unless there is just a whole lot more than what you said. You should also know that many children with Autism are probably smarter and more capable than your son. Autism does not have anything to do with stupid, and many of us with autistic children had children who were every bit as smart as yours seems to be, and felt exactly like you do about them. You would be surprised how many of us who raised that autism question with our pediatricians about our smart kids were also written off as crazy; but we were smart enough to know different when the issues that made us think something was wrong kept hitting us in the face, no matter how smart our kids were or what our uninformed pediatrician said.
I would just caution you that you must not have any idea how you sound, and you should go back and read what you wrote, because it lacks not just enlightenment, but also empathy. All the effort in the world would not get those of us with children who have mental retardation your "result" and we are just as proud of our babies, because children do not have to earn a mothers pride because of what they can do. Pride is a function of nurture and love; by playing the results based game of "look what I did, I am such a good Mom!" you open yourself to this criticism, and you should put your big girl panties on and learn a big lesson here about how you appear to the rest of the world. I would also say to you that just because other parents have the bad taste to brag about their children's sports acheivment and some how live through their accomplishments (and I am not at all saying that they all do!) that does not mean that you then have an entitlement to be as distasteful. You are not really responsible for your son's IQ, but for the genetic information you contributed and the basic availablity of enrichment in his environment, and parents with children who excel in sports contributed the genetic information that entabled the child to excell, the parents provided the child with the enriched enviornment to practice the skill, but the child put in the practice to get there. The same will be true for your son once he is really old enough to judge his intellectual accomplishments. He is not there yet, and your contribution will be just as minimal to his accomplishment as any sports parents.
You are bragging. Your boasts are premature, and insensitive. Try enjoying your pride a little more privetly, and have a little more humility by being complentary to everyone else such that they have no idea how critically you are judeging their "inferior" skills, which is how you come off and why you are getting the reaction you are getting from so many, I gather, because it is why you are getting the reaction you are getting from me. You have zero idea how good my mothering skills are based on the outcome you would see with my very smart autistic child, my mentally deficient autistic child, or my nuerotypical high acheiver. NONE.
M.
You know, the more you prattle on about it in "so what happened," the more I wonder if you are not really worried and that is why you are so defensive about the comments, which should not be sending a grown woman into the stratosphere. Look up Asperger and read about it. They are the only group of very young children I know of who are little professors and enjoy or even seek out the opportunity to "teach" others (this is also known as monologuing, and is really one form of psychological ridigity.) If that is a repeated issue for him, see a Developmenta Pediatrician, because you seem to have more than one person who has noticed a flag and maybe the comments were not so ignorant? It is not "obvious" that he does not have an ASD by anything you said, in fact, that he has atypcial and odd friendly behaviors and has obviously learned to mimic reciprocity such that other people find it uncomfortable, could absolutly meet the criteria for atypical social interactions (the diagnositic crieteria for social interatcion does not call for a total absence of social skill, and there is no particular social skill that any child could possess that would rule out autism.) What sent you over this edge?