Fact: My Girls Are Smarter Than My Boy

Master12 can be quite a clever lad, but he is an idiot compared to his sisters. Even his seven year old sister runs rings around him in the smarts department.

“Okay, hurry up,” I said to the kids at the toilet block. It was the final loo run for the evening. With luck. “Let’s get everyone through so we can get back to the nice warm bus and you guys can go to bed.”

“I’m first!” yelled Miss7, shouldering past her brother into one of the two bathrooms at Deepwater Inn, where we’re parked up for a couple of nights. We found this place on a Facebook page promoting country pub stopovers. It’s family friendly and perfectly situated between Tenterfield and Glen Innis. And it’s a pub. Did I mention it’s a pub? That’s the adult equivalent of camping at Movieworld

“Hey, I’m busting!” complained Master12. His big sister had beat out the competition for the other bathroom and the line up was two deep over there.

Suddenly, the door in front of him opened and Miss7 emerged.

“Actually, you can go first,” she told her brother.

“I don’t mind,” said Master12. “Just hurry.”

Instead of going back in, Miss7 ducked behind her brother and shoved him through the door.

“You first,” she insisted.

Isn’t that lovely, I thought to myself. Followed immediately by, I wonder if there was a floater in there or something.

But Master12 wasn’t complaining on the other side of the door, so I went back to my original summation. It was, I re-thought, such a lovely thing for her to have done, so I told her as much and gave her a squeeze.

Not that Master12 didn’t find something to whinge about. In fact, he came out complaining nearly as much as he did going in.

“The water is so cold,” he said, shoving his hands into his shorts and trying to wriggle his way into my dressing gown as Miss7 shut the door behind him.

A minute later, she was out.

“How cold was the water?!” Master12 half asked, half told her. “It was like ice.”

We both expected her to agree, and I was already preparing to have her steal all the heat from the other side of my body., but instead…

“I used warm water to wash my hands,” she said, and left the building to wait outside.

For a second Master12 just stared after her like she’d been a ghost. Not your average ghost, either. More an Obi-wan.

“OMG,” he suddenly exclaimed. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Shortly, we were all headed back to the bus and our nice warm beds, and Master12 was telling his other sisters about how clever his seven year old sister was.

“I didn’t even know you could turn the tap the other way to get hot water,” he told them.

“Really?” Miss13 asked him incredulously. “You didn’t know that?”

The consensus was he was an idiot. Even the five year old had worked the tap out.

“The water was fine,” Miss10 said, “but the toilet seat was soooo cold.”

At this point I felt a tug on my dressing gown and Miss7 was indicating for me to bend down so she could say something to me in private. Something which went even further than the cold tap ice water incident to prove my son is both outnumbered and outsmarted in this household.

“Don’t let him know but that’s why I let him go to the toilet first,” Miss7 whispered to me. “So the toilet seat would be warm.”

Raising a family on little more than laughs

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