I was up awfully early this morning. In fact, I was up all night because of my 14-month-old daughter Mary Ellen. Five times she woke up bellyaching about one thing or another. But being a toddler, that's about all she can do: cry, whine, and fuss when she wants something. I do that myself from time to time, but unlike her, no pretty lady comes along and jams a boob in my mouth to shut me up.

As the saying goes, youth is wasted on the young. So are boobs.

About the fourth time Mary Ellen woke up, I hauled her out of the playpen and let her sit on the floor in front of the couch while I went to get her something to nibble on. When I came back, she was watching the news, a thumb stuck in her mouth and the other arm firmly clutching a pink teddy bear to her chest. She looked comfortable enough, so I set a small box of raisins next to her then parked myself on the couch and watched the news with her.

An interesting story came on about a 14-year-old girl named Alia Sabur who is getting her Ph.D. in engineering; specifically nano-photonics. And she's only fourteen!

Long before Mary Ellen was born, I was determined that my first child would be an academic superstar. A world-class child prodigy. During the first year of her life, I made flash cards for her featuring letters of the alphabet, bought her an undetermined number of books, and made every effort to speak clearly and concisely and articulate my every syllable that she might learn to speak early on. I was doing my part to go that extra mile to ensure she had a head start on her education.

Unfortunately, she wasn't as hip to learning as I had hoped. She peed all over her flash cards. She isn't interested in you reading her books to her; only that you flip the pages quickly and make the appropriate animal noises for the creatures depicted. And, to date, the only words she knows are "uh oh" and "meow" - because we have three cats. I've tried reading her excerpts from Principles of Contract Law by Steven J. Burton, but she wasn't having any of it.

"In Scott v. United States, 79 U.S. (12 Wall.) 443, 445, 20 L.Ed. 438 (1870), the Supreme Court stated: '...If a contract be unreasonable and unconscionable, but not void for fraud, a court of law will give to the party who sues for its breach damages, not according to its letter, but only such as he is equitably entitled to...'"