She's 2½. IQ test later, she joined Mensa as their youngest member

Soon after their daughter Isla turned 2, Amanda and Jason McNabb began to notice strange arrangements of plastic, colorful toy letters outside of their suburban Louisville home.

The McNabbs were astounded by Isla's exceptional abilities from a young age, leading them to explore her intellectual prowess further. At the age of 2½, they decided to have Isla undergo a iq test free in May, discovering that she scored in the top 1% of her community. This remarkable achievement earned her a coveted spot in Mensa, a distinguished group for individuals with IQs in the top 2 percent, making her the youngest Mensa member in the country.

C-H-A-I-R next to a chair

S-O-F-A by the couch

Also, TV is close to the Amazon Fire Stick remote.

Nobody was able to hide, not even Booger. The McNabbs found another set of the now-familiar block letters next to their family's tabby cat. This time, the letters spelled out C-A-T.

Their child was to blame. The McNabbs said that Isla's parents had her IQ tested in May, when she was almost 2½ years old, because of her fancy subtitles. They found out at the end of the month that Isla had scored in the top 1% of the community. Because of how well she did, she was able to join Mensa, a group for people with IQs in the top 2 percent.

Charles Brown, a spokesman for American Mensa, said in an email that she is now the youngest member of Mensa in the country. In 2019, Brown talked about a 2-year-old boy from Texas who joined the group. He said the boy was one of only three members younger than 4 and one of 56 younger than 6.

Brown told WFAA, "That's out of 50,000 that belong."

A 2-year-old child in Kentucky sounds out words 3:39

Kids in Mensa, like 2-year-old Isla McNabb, used notes to sound out words like "excited" and "rainbow" on June 30. Amanda McNabb in the video

In Isla's first few years, her 43-year-old father, Jason McNabb, said there were times when the hair on the back of his neck stood up. These were what he called "creepy moments" that made him think something strange was going on.

But around the time she turned 2 in November, they were more than just passing thoughts and feelings. Isla liked the alphabet and had been figuring out what each letter meant on her own. Her mom is an auditor, and her dad is a doctor. For her birthday, they gave her a tablet. Jason showed Isla how to sound out some letters after he wrote them down. Putting those letters together to see if she could figure it out, he wrote the word "red."

Jason said, "She checked it out and said, 'Red.'"

First they tried "blue," then "yellow," and finally "purple." She got all of them. Then her mom came up with a word that she was sure would confuse her: "orange."

"There's no way," Amanda, 38, said, remembering what she thought at the time.

Island also got orange.

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He said, "It seemed like she picked up everything we threw at her right away." I thought it was amazing.

Once they did that, the McNabbs kept teaching her new words. She was able to sound out the letters until she could read the word almost every time. Her parents began to write things down. Isla knew about 100 words when they first started. It went from 100 to 200 very quickly. When they got to 500, they stopped.

Aman told her, "Now she can just read."

Within the last few months, Isla's parents told her caregiver that she could read at a visit. The doctor thought they meant she had learned stories by heart that her parents had told her many times. They then showed Isla a sign in the doctor's office that warned about the risks of leaving babies alone on an exam table. Isla read it all out loud.

"Oh! The child's doctor said, "She can read."

Isla learned more than just how to read, which is something most kids start doing around age 6 or 7. She began to count, but all of a sudden she started to do it backwards. She knows how to do easy math, like subtracting. Amanda helped Isla pass the time one day by giving her crayons and an empty Amazon box. She saw that Isla had written M-O-M, or a good guess since she couldn't write very well. Writing had grown out of reading.

Amanda looked into psychologists who gave IQ tests and found one in Lexington, which is a little over an hour's drive from their house. He told her that he didn't usually test kids smaller than 4. But because her claims interested him, he made an exception. The Washington Post looked at Isla's scores on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales and found that she is "superior" or "very superior" in every area.

She got a score in the 99th percentile.

Even though Isla is smart, she is just a normal child. Her favorite shows are "Bluey," an Australian cartoon about a blue heeler farm dog, and "Blippi," a kids' show on YouTube that her dad called "modern-day Pee-wee Herman." As of last month, she started preschool and is now crazy about making friends and her teacher, Miss Abigail. She also likes to play outside and put together jigsaw projects.

"Normal kid stuff," her mom said, adding that Isla loves reading and the library.

Her favorite books are the Pete the Cat series and "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom," which teaches kids the alphabet. It does this by telling a story about a coconut tree that falls over when all 26 letters are on it.

Her parents say that Isla re-creates the ending of the book by putting her block letters inside Booger's cat tree and then flipping it over to spread the letters. "That's something we do several times a day," Amanda said with the annoyed tone and look that only child parents can get.

Two-year-old boy from Kentucky accepted into Mensa 2:56

On June 30, Crestwood, Ky., 2-year-old Isla McNabb read "Pete the Cat" out loud to her parents. Amanda McNabb in the video

The two of them are, well, tired. The psychologist who tested Isla told the McNabbs that it's normal for smart kids to sleep less, which made them feel better about their daughter's sleep situation. They were glad their daughter was healthy, but they didn't look forward to her waking them up at 4 a.m. every morning.

"That's not good news for us," her mother said.

Amanda said she knows one thing for sure. Getting her daughter tested was exciting for her, but she is not going to do it herself. “I tell people I’m not going to take the test,” she said.

"She shouldn't know that she's smarter than me," I said.