Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Obamas as Parents

The media seem obsessed with Barack and Michelle Obama, with Michelle’s clothing (tongues were clucking at the fact that she wore a sleeveless ensemble to her husband’s address to a joint session of Congress), with their daughters’ clothes, toys and JoBro fandom. Not a week has gone by when I haven’t read a story about the Obamas’ journey through parenthood.

This past Sunday, the New York Times ran yet another story about the Obamas’ parenting style, “First Chores? You Bet,” portraying them as loving, but strict with their daughters, ages 7 and 10:

“In the Obama White House, bedtime is still at 8 p.m. The girls still set their own alarm clocks and get themselves up for school in the morning. They make their own beds and clean their own rooms. And when the much-anticipated pet arrives, they will walk the dog and scoop its poop.

. . . Mr. Obama is a modern-day dad who leaves the Oval Office for dinner with his girls, rarely misses a parent-teacher conference or piano recital and prides himself on having read all seven books in the Harry Potter series aloud with Malia.

Mrs. Obama juggles play dates and homework with speeches to federal agencies and students. Both are committed to keeping their daughters grounded, their friends and aides say.”

As a mom with kids the exact same age as the Obamas — twins who are 10 and a 7-year-old — it will be interesting for me to watch them raise their children as I raise mine, but I’m hoping that the media will back off and let the family settle in and try to normalize the girls’ lives as much as life can be “normal” at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And no more stories on the girls’ clothing or backpacks, please.

Item #2: You Looking to be Led by a First Daddy?

In the same issue of the New York Times, there was another article about Barack Obama, the dad, this time in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Entitled, “Father in Chief,” this piece by Lisa Belkin likened being a dad to being the president:

“We are intrigued by the first family not only because their children are adorable and so excited about getting a puppy and meeting the Jonas Brothers but also because our president seems to be such a good father — loving but not a pushover, thrilled that he now has a job where he can be with the girls for breakfast and dinner, strict about their chores, slightly cranky when their school is canceled ‘because of what? Some ice?’”

Then she swerved into a comparison, saying governing is “messy” like parenting:

“There are big differences, of course, between parenting and governing. Unlike children, we choose our leaders; the job of those leaders is not to nurture us emotionally; and the fantasy of a wise, all-powerful Daddy is what has gotten Russia and Germany in trouble over the years. But if Obama is going to struggle in his metaphorical role as parent to the country, it will be less because of the differences between parenting and leadership and more because of the similarities.”

I wonder if that mindset is what led Time Magazine’s Joe Klein to extend the analogy on MSNBC’s Morning Joe today. While discussing new CBS News polling numbers showing that a vast majority of Americans support President Obama and his proposals to jump-start our flailing economy, Klein quipped: “People are scared. They want to see government activism. They’re looking for Daddy.” (Link to video here.)

President Obama himself during his address to the joint session of Congress this week, also invoked his role as the First Dad when he was discussing how parents can help their children achieve their educational goals:

“In the end, there is no program or policy that can substitute for a mother or father who will attend those parent/teacher conferences, or help with homework after dinner, or turn off the TV, put away the video games, and read to their child. I speak to you not just as a president, but as a father when I say that responsibility for our children’s education must begin at home.”

I’m planning on quoting Obama the next time my kids balk at my request to turn off their TV shows/video games, per order of the Daddy-in-Chief.

Item #3: The Dirt on Working from Home

The same woman who wrote the Times article comparing governing to parenting — Belkin — recently posted an interesting blog item on her Motherlode blog entitled, “The Messy Side of Working from Home.”

“One side effect of the [economic] downturn may well be more parents working from home. For some it will be involuntary cobbling together a home business after losing an office job. For some it will be a way to save on the expenses of going elsewhere for work — no more office space to lease, no more commuting costs. And for many it will be a way to save on childcare. Work during nap time, or play dates or on wi-fi while watching karate practice. It can be done. Right? RIGHT?

Working from home solves many problems, but as one who has done it for nearly 15 years, I should warn you that it creates others you might not expect.”

Belkin described having to literally leave the house and then re-enter, once a babysitter was there, in order to stop her son from screaming and shrieking while she worked.

As a work-from-home writer for the last decade, I have to say that her observations are on the money. Sure, working from home gets slightly easier once the kids are older and in school, but the time I have alone in the house to spend on my writing once the kids leave from school doesn’t constitute a full work day. Therefore I have to get creative. Some of the keys of doing it without going crazy are: Being flexible, being willing to work at night (after the kids are in bed) and working on a weekend, when a spouse could watch the kids while you work.

Image credit: Jae C. Hong/Associated Press via the New York Times.

Item #1: First Granny

Michelle Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, is moving into the White House along with the Obama family in order to help 10-year-old Malia and 7-year-old Sasha adjust to their new situation while their parents settle into their new jobs.

Apparently the Obamas aren’t alone in forming a multi-generational household. The New York Times profiled several families with young children and two working parents who also have Grandma living with them, and cited statistics saying that this trend is heating up.

“A recent study by AARP shows that multi-generational households are on the rise, up from 5 million in 2000 to 6.2 million last year, an increase from 4.8 percent of all households to 5.3 percent,” the Times reported. An AARP official added: “Our cultural norms [about having grandparents moving in with their adult children] are shifting. There is a great renaissance of what we think about when we think about family.”

I wrote a column a few weeks ago about how I was coveting Marian Robinson and musing about how much easier my life would be if I had a grandmother like her, who was retired, ready, willing and able to cart the kids around to their activities, help out with the homework and dinner prep.

Item #2: Pediatrician Channels Miss Manners

A pediatrician fumed in a column in the New York Times this week that a particular patient of hers — who she nicknamed “The Rude Boy” — hadn’t been taught any manners. She fretted that if his situation was left unchecked, the child could grow up to become become a bully at worst, or an adult with grossly undeveloped social skills that could hinder him in the future.

“As a pediatrician, I worry about the trajectories of children’s growth and development: measuring a baby’s head size, weighing a toddler, asking about the language skills of a preschooler,” wrote Dr. Perri Klass. “Manners are another side of the journey every child makes from helplessness to autonomy. And a child who learns to manage a little courtesy, even under the pressure of a visit to the doctor, is a child who is operating well in the world, a child with a positive prognosis.”

Rude little heathens running around like maniacs in public make me crazy too.

As far as I know, my own three heathens aren’t rude in public; they save their savageness for me. However, if you hear or see differently, please contact me immediately.

Item #3: TV/Video Games for Recess

Guess I’d better re-work my kids’ TV/video game schedules. Typically, my three children (10, 10 and 7) are allotted one hour a day (give or take five minutes) for TV and/or video games, though that rule doesn’t apply to weekends when we have things like family movie night, or watch news or sports programming (a la NBC’s Nightly News or MSNBC’s Morning Joe, or a Red Sox or Patriots game).

Then I heard from The Girl yesterday that during indoor recess for her fourth grade class, they’ll be watching TV. Her twin brother told me he and some buddies have been playing video games on the internet during recess.

So when I told them that maybe I shouldn’t allow them to have their one hour of screen time on days when they’ve already had recreational screen time in school, that went over about as well as the matzo ball soup I served last week for dinner, which only one out of my three children would eat. (The two who found my homemade soup “gross” at cereal.)

Whatever happened to playing board games, games involving the class, doing something with arts and crafts or, horror of all horrors, reading during indoor recess at SCHOOL? I must just be horribly out of touch and old fashioned.

Image credit: New York Times/Gary Hovland.

Item #1: New find — The Pajama Diaries

Amidst the glut of post-election analyses, number crunching and U.S. maps colored red and blue, this week I discovered a new comic strip in the Boston Globe. (If it was there before, I hadn’t noticed it until now. My bad.)

The Pajama Diaries, by Terri Libenson, features a character named Jill who is a freelance graphic designer who works out of her house, is married, and has two young girls. (That could be me, only with three kids, only one of whom is a girl.) Jill lives across the street from a family whose home she snarkily dubbed “Perfectville” and uses the DVD player as a babysitter so she can quickly get some work done without interruption from the little people.

After reading through some of her previous comic strips, they hit home, both about the challenges of working from home and about the struggle against the perfect, and they made me laugh. It’s gonna be a new staple in the Picket Fence Post home.

Item #2: Boston Globe Features ‘Mommy Dating’

Ever bring your kids to a local playground and hoped that a mom would talk to you or that a group of moms would welcome you into their fold? That’s called “mommy dating,” according to the Boston Globe  which likens playgrounds to meat markets:

“To the casual observer, the playground may appear a pleasant tableau of mothers and babysitters and, oh, children. But to the initiated, it can be as socially charged as a singles’ bar. The blonde mom over here, the organics-only mom over there, the insecure moms hovering near the swings, pretending to be occupied by the kids. Meanwhile, style is assessed, labels identified, judgments made.”

Now that my kids have gotten older and we don’t hang out at playgrounds like we used to, I’ve become the mom standing on the sidelines at one of my kids’ bazillion games, chugging a caffeinated beverage, and hoping someone won’t point a finger at me and say, “There’s the mom who hates on kids’ sports and the PTO online and in columns. Don’t talk to her.”

Item #3: First Family Gets Ready

On page one of today’s New York Times there’s a feature story entitled, ”A Family Expected to Balance State Dinners with Sleepovers.” The reporter spoke with Michelle Obama’s Chicago friends and how the First Family plans to create its own support system for the girls on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Interesting read.

Image credit: The Pajama Diaries.

“There will be young children in the White House for the first time since the Kennedy generation,” so said NBC’s Brian Williams at 11 p.m. on election night after projecting the state of California for Senator Barack Obama, thereby earning him enough electoral votes to capture the presidency.

My children are the same ages as Malia and Sasha Obama, 10 and 7. Michelle Obama has struggled with the same working mom issues as I have (although I don’t have a mega-watt, power job like hers). Michelle and Barack Obama were married two weeks before The Spouse and I were wed. With all those similarities, it will be fascinating for me to watch the Obamas navigate parenthood and their work while the whole world is watching.

For my kids, it’s also going to be interesting to see their experiences mirrored by children in the White House, especially for The Girl, who feels a kinship with Malia because they’re both Hannah Montana and Jonas Brothers fans.

Image credits: The Huffington Post.

UPDATE: I just had a column about First Kids in the White House published on the Mommy Track’d web site.

* 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.

Anyone catch the Obama girls during Monday night’s Democratic convention? Seven-year-old Sasha and 10-year-old Malia were adorable and a bit precocious. As they came onto the stage to hug their mother Michelle after she told a national audience that the Obama family is just like anyone else’s, the girls turned toward a creepy Orwellian TV screen with their father’s face on it. They offered Barack their high-pitched greetings and awkwardly interrupted his own political pitch.

I always love it when kids drag their politician parents off-message when the media’s watching. In those moments we get to see a glimpse of the pols’ authentic selves, the part that remains unpolished by political consultants. Meanwhile we mere mortal parents are interrupted and pulled off-message on a daily basis — on the phone, during attempts to discuss something at the dinner table – although not while we’re in front of a television audience.