My brain hurts from this lack of sleep.  Since I’m up most nights listening to Patrick grunt and watching infomercials and pondering ‘where the hell is the free pure-bred puppy & new boat I was promised in this stimulus package?’ Maggie is now the exclusive source of brains in the house.  Just ask her!   You thought maybe Ken Jennings or Albert Einstein or Leonardo Da Vinci were the smartest humans alive?  No, the smartest humans alive are Eleven Year Olds. Yes those fancy fifth graders, specifically girl ones with their own locker, three siblings to lord over and their own cell phone. OOOH AAAH. 

My own personal Genius Eleven Year old has recently perfected the smart-mouth rhetorical question. “Maggie, can you get the mail?”  “Do you see I am busy right now????”   “Someone needs to pick up theses shoes and coats.”  “Can you see that those aren’t mine?”  “Should I get this cool mineral makeup kit I saw on QVC?”  “Why? Daddy says we are saving money and you know you’ll just send it back”   SEE??? SMART MOUTH!

Other Genius Eleven Year Old pastimes include Googling and recreating hairstyles from Mamma Mia  & perusing the Pottery Barn Teen catalogue (which led to THIS brilliant exchange: “Sammeeeee-uh, you can’t look at this catalogue! It’s says ‘TEEN’ on it and you are only seven.” But, eleven is teen now?  Ummm, okay.  But I’M the dumb one for suggesting she take a shower sometime this week…?

Where the Genius Eleven Year Old has redeemed herself and conveniently dodged a mouthful of Irish Spring, is helping with the baby. You know the baby that she prayed and prayed and prayed to God for and mommy was nice enough to carry for her and deliver three days before her 11^th birthday?  Of course, conventional wisdom was that Patrick would get boring to these girls after the newness wore off. But, unlike most of the Christmas gifts that have since been forgotten or, in the case of the Wii Guitar Hero, totally taken over by Jerry, she is still totally into him. She got up at 2:45am last night to help since Daddy was out of town.  She sat up in bed, dutifully as any mommy would, fed him his bottle, changed his diaper and then rocked him back to sleep.  She held in his pacifier and petted his head to get him to calm down as she herself dozed off.  Such a cute moment. And to think I might have missed it had I not been up wondering:  “Who would win in a fistfight between the ShamWow Guy and Billy Mays of OxyClean?”