Picket Fence Post

* Cross-posted from Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum. *

Phew! Anyone else feel as though you’ve been through a marathon? Two years of watching every debate in both parties, of reading online and in newspapers and magazines about the campaign, of watching YouTube videos, of following every detail of the race can take a lot out of a person. And I wasn’t even a candidate, the spouse of a candidate, working for the campaign or covering it as an embedded reporter. Those folks must feel as though they’ve been run over by a truck right about now.

At 11 p.m. last night, after the networks officially called the entire presidential election for Illinois Senator Barack Obama, I ran upstairs and woke up my kids to tell them the news. They weren’t completely awake, though, and didn’t remember that I’d woken them up when I spoke with them this morning. However, after learning of the results, along with the fact that 10-year-old Malia Obama and 7-year-old Sasha Obama were promised a puppy by their dad, I saw that puppy-gleam in their eyes too. (Sorry kids, you’re not getting a puppy. Your parents didn’t just complete a presidential campaign.)

Kudos are due to Arizona Senator John McCain, who was eloquent and gracious in making his concession speech. I felt badly for him while watching him, a former POW, tearing up as he acknowledged the historic nature of Obama’s win. He’s an honorable man who was saddled with a bad campaign that made bad choices. Had he won and a woman ascended to the vice presidency for the first time in our nation’s history, I would like to think that people would’ve been moved to see a woman succeed.

And Obama’s acceptance speech, in my humble opinion, will be one children will later read about in history books:

* Cross-posted at Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum. *

Voting: I took the kids with me to vote in our small town in the western suburbs of Boston this morning at around 10. (There’s no school today.)

We saw no lines as we entered the school gym and were greeted by a sweet Girl Scout. We waited patiently as she explained in a whisper-soft voice, where we needed to go first — to check in by our street address. With my ballot in hand, the kids jockeyed for a good position in which to get a look at it as we crammed ourselves into the polling booth. They couldn’t believe how many people were running for president. They thought it was just John McCain and Barack Obama.

“The Green-Rainbow Party?” my daughter asked incredulously.

“Yep,” I said, as I read aloud all the different presidential/vice presidential candidates and their corresponding parties and the children shook their heads.

They were a bit dismayed when I wouldn’t let them fill in the bubbles with the black pen provided — there was no chance I was going to risk them filling in the wrong circle and ruin my opportunity to vote in this election — but I did let them help me feed the paper ballot into the machine when we were done. The dullness of putting a ballot into a machine made me miss the time when I voted in my first election in my hometown where they have actual levers to pull and a curtain that would dramatically open and record my choices when I was done. It’s anti-climatic to fill in a bubble with a pen.

MSNBC All Day: I’ve had MSNBC on TV all day. I’m a sucker for their “Election Center” in Rockefeller Center and am a big crazy fan of the crew from Morning Joe.

Random Observations:

I thought Barack and Michelle Obama took a really long time filling out their ballots in Chicago. They must have had a huge number of Illinois ballot questions or many contested races. (Massachusetts had three ballot questions.) Their 10-year-old daughter Malia, in her hoodie, looked thoroughly bored and yawned several times.

The first thing that came to my mind when I saw Sarah and Todd Palin leave the polls in Wasilla? Shamefully, it was that, as I looked at the vice presidential candidate, I wondered if she’d already given all the expensive campaign-funded duds away to charity.

Calling the Winner Early: I was disturbed by a piece I saw in today’s New York Times about when the broadcast and cable news networks will project a winner tonight. I’m a big believer — even in the age of the Internet, Twitter and Facebook — of officially holding back on projecting a winner in the presidential race when people are still in the process of voting.

If a candidate concedes, then that person is affecting the voter turnout in places where the votes haven’t yet been cast and it’s not the media’s doing.

But if a candidate hasn’t yet conceded, the decent, patriotic thing to do is to wait until polls have closed before calling a state’s results. If the networks call the entire election before the folks on the west coast have finished voting, that move would essentially tell people who haven’t yet voted that their votes are irrelevant.

The viewers can wait. A little while anyway.

Item #1: Kids Pick the President

We adults cast our votes for the next commander in chief on Tuesday, that is if you haven’t already voted in those states that allow early voting.

But last week, 2.2 million Nickelodeon viewers made their choice: Senator Barack Obama, who won with 51 percent of the vote to Senator John McCain’s 49 percent.

According to United Press International: “Nickelodeon said it has held a kids’ vote every presidential election year since 1988, and children have correctly predicted the winner of four out of the last five U.S. presidential campaigns.”

The last time the kids picked incorrectly? Four years ago, when they selected Senator John Kerry.

Item #2: Bad Sports Mom

My November Parents & Kids column isn’t going to win me any popularity contests with folks on the sidelines of my kids’ sports and after-school activities. Why? Because it’s about what a bad sports mom I am because I don’t like how much of my family’s time the children’s activities consume. And I’m a tad bitter about it.

Item #3: Christmas Lists. In October.

My mother (*waving “Hi” to her as she reads this blog*) called me last night to request a list of Christmas gift recommendations for the Picket Fence Post-lings. As an organized person is wont to do, she would like to get her Christmas shopping done early so she can thoroughly enjoy the Yuletide season without the stress of racing around to stores.

However I wasn’t feeling particularly organized at the moment of her call, as I was still wrangling with The Eldest Boy over his Halloween costume. In fact, the subject of children and gift giving/receiving is a sore one in my household right now as The Spouse and I continue to debate The Eldest Boy’s birthday present. My 10-year-old Alex P. Keaton seems to think he can just return the gift he’d previously said he wanted and take the cash instead. This issue will be the focus of my December Parents & Kids column. (FYI — If you have any good Christmas list/gift anecdotes or suggestions, please post them in the comments section below.)

Therefore, when my unsuspecting mother brought up the topic of Christmas lists last night, my head exploded. Luckily she was on the phone and not at my house. Was a tad messy.

Sorry Mom. The list is going to take a while, unless, of course, you just want to get them clothes, which they really need. Pajamas would be good.

Image credit: Obama/Biden campaign.

Over the beautiful fall weekend, the three kiddos, The Spouse and I attended some traditional, quaint New England events, including a parade and a fair.

And as we drove around in suburbs west of Boston, marveling at the glowing red, yellow and orange leaves — so bright and lovely over the weekend – we spotted a number of bright blue McCain-Palin lawn signs in front of several homes.

But the most original indication that we’re in the middle of a presidential election season came in the form of the jack o’lantern pictured at the left. Regardless of for which presidential ticket you’ll be voting, you’ve got to hand it to the jack o’lantern artiste who carved this pumpkin.

As I continued to marvel at the surprising GOP vice presidential selection, I fired off a column about my impressions of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s first national speech to the folks at Mommy Track’d in a piece entitled, “McCain & The Working Mom.”

Additionally, I wrote an essay about the difficulties working women have when they are asked to speak at national political conventions when their spouses are running for president, called, “Michelle As First Lady: General Election Edition.”

Image credit: Associated Press/Kiichiro Sato.

At 44, she’s the first female governor of Alaska.

She used to be a TV sports reporter.

She played girls basketball and is into outdoorsy kinds of things, like hunting.

She has five kids, including a 4-month-old with Down Syndrome.

She calls herself a “hockey mom.”

And today, GOP presidential nominee John McCain picked her, Sarah Palin, as his vice presidential running mate.

It will be interesting to see how much her motherhood and her baby play into the media coverage of her selection. Barack Obama has two little girls — ages 7 and 10 — but his wife and his mother-in-law are taking care of them while he’s out on the campaign trail. Will Palin’s husband garner the type of coverage Michelle Obama gets when it comes to issues of balancing work and family? This, my friends, is going to be very, very interesting.

Image credit: Daylife/AP/Al Grillo.