INDIANAPOLIS – Danica Patrick doesn’t mind getting her hands dirty with a race car, but diapers?
Who knew?
Now before the world explodes into a “Danica is pregnant” frenzy, put that to a rest right now.
She’s NOT pregnant.
But Danica most definitely is enjoying being a doting aunt to her younger sister Brooke’s infant daughter, Reese, born this past January.
“Do I change diapers? Heck yeah, yeah, I do, I don’t mind,” Patrick said in a Saturday press conference at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. “I was changing a diaper, and I had a new one ready to go, and all of a sudden I looked down, and I’m like, ‘Gosh, girl, you were sweating, weren’t you?’
“And I’m like, ‘No, you peed again.’ So then I went for another diaper.”
And then in a wry tone with a slight smile on her face, Patrick even found an upside to what can be a dirty job: “At least it wasn’t a boy, right? That would have been in my face.”
Patrick, who is going strong into a second year in a relationship with fellow Sprint Cup driver Ricky Stenhouse Jr., likes to play dress-up with Reese.
Make that dressing up Reese.
“Yeah, Reese is really cute, my sister’s little girl,” Patrick said. “She was here today and she was dressed in one of the, as you said it, expensive gifts in one of those expensive outfits that I found for her downtown Chicago and she looked very cute.
“But I do my best, yes (as an aunt). I try. I also try and take care of my sister and my parents and everybody else, too. But it’s impossible when you have a little niece to be able to walk by a little girls’ clothing and not go, ‘Oh, my God, look at that, I have to buy it!’ So I do.”
Patrick even got playful with reporters about her niece. When she was first asked about Reese, Patrick wistfully talked about her own new “kid,” a miniature Siberian Husky puppy named Dallas.
“Those blue eyes, that soft hair, those sharp teeth,” Patrick said near-wistfully before correcting herself. “Oh, I was talking about Dallas. Were you talking about Dallas?”
Follow me @JerryBonkowski