Maybe looking after tadpoles or plants is too simple and boring for her? Maybe she'd like some more challenging tasks, where she can show how intelligent she is? I dunno how old she is, but maybe stuff like painting, sculpting something out of clay, then baking and painting it, etc.
Over the last 8 years I've bought oodles of toys for her hoping that one day, she'll 'engage' with one and actually play with it. Barbies, stuffed toys, little plastic animals, a zillion and one games on the computer, lego, you name it. Until this year she spent most of her time sort of hovering just outside our study talking to us, or talking to the neighbour out the window, or talking to passers-by, or drawing the same picture over and over and over and over. While talking. Someone said they stop talking out loud when they are 4, but it never happened.
The stuff that actually engaged her were:
Anything you can make patterns with, her favourites being a set of coasters and a set of wooden blocks she made these insane symmetrical 'marble slides' with.
Cleaning the house and sorting and organising things we don't want her to.
Drawing the same picture over and over in Paint on the computer.
Then this year, we got a television and she decided that sitting in front of it watching The Simpsons is the best thing in the entire universe, and she doesn't hover around talking anymore. She sits in front of the television talking about it so loud we can hear her two rooms away.
And finally, a few months ago she realised that the 20 kilos of lego I bought her a few years ago is actually fun
She stopped playing with the lego not long after she got it - when the instruction manuals it came with wore out. She only ever made the things in the manuals, never anything freeform.
My other kid will play with anything and everything and doesn't make patterns or hover around doing nothing, which is about when the penny dropped that there is probably something 'off' with the first kid. The first kid thinks it is really weird that the second one doesn't make patterns with things. Kid #2 is well over a year behind kid #1 in talking and pattern matching but we've since discovered that kid #2 is actually bog standard normal in all aspects (besides volume of hair and amount she sleeps) and kid #1 was wildly advanced at that age, and is now old enough to actually be having social issues as socially she really hasn't changed since she was a toddler. If I'd had another kid earlier instead of having a 7 year gap or I'd been a stay-at-home mum instead of working I probably would have spotted the differences between her and other kids years ago. But academically she's always been so far above all the other students noone has ever raised any issues about the social stuff.
The queue to get assessed for aspergers? 12-18 months ...
