Picket Fence Post

* 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.

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.

During last night’s vice presidential debate a number of references were made to the candidates’ parenthood.

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, a self-described pitbull of a hockey mom, said that if you want to gauge how people are feeling about the economy, just go to a kids’ soccer game, talk to the parents and you’ll hear expressions of fear and worry about the future. She also said that, if elected, she’d bring her Main Streeter, average mom point of view to Washington.

Meanwhile, Senator Joe Biden said he understands all too well what it’s like to be a single dad who sits around the kitchen table wondering how he’s going to take care of his kids and pay for all their expenses. In an emotional moment, he choked up recalling the fatal accident that took the lives of his first wife and his daughter, and sent his two sons to the hospital. The Wall Street Journal’s The Juggle blogused Biden’s moment as a jumping off point to discuss whether single dads get enough credit for their parenting.

Meanwhile, both candidates, as well as Senator John McCain, have sons serving in Iraq, making the discussion of the war in Iraq a very personal one as well as a policy-oriented exercise.

My favorite moment:The post-debate photo op, where the Palin and Biden families converged on stage. It was the most genuine, real moment of the whole event. However as I watched Palin’s daughter Piper, 7, walk around holding her infant brother Trig, I was holding my breath because it didn’t look like she had a solid hold on him. Just like when Mama Palin gave her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, I was sure Piper was going to drop her brother.

Get my take on the overall debate performances in my Suburban Mom’s Political Fix.

Image credit: New York Times/James Estrin.

Seven-year-old Piper Palin — who’s the same age as Sasha Obama — provided one of those moments last night at the Republican convention that makes parents like me, the mother of a 7-year-old boy, simultaneously laugh and cringe.

While Sasha Obama stole some of her mother Michelle’s thunder at the Democratic convention last week when she took the microphone and bellowed greetings to her dad via satellite TV, Piper Palin was sitting in the audience near her dad Todd last night and was holding her baby brother during her mom’s speech. Then Piper “groomed” her little bro in a moment only a parent of another little kid could love. ( Video clip here.)

Item #1: School Supply Woes in NYC

When it comes to crazy-long school supply lists, apparently my kids’ public schools aren’t the only ones doling them out. The New York Times ran a page one piece about schools in the New York area and elsewhere which are asking parents to shell out big bucks for supplies, including one mom who had ”10 boxes of baby wipes” on her kindergartener’s list.

“. . . [A]ccording to the New York State School Boards Association, supplies run an average of $100 for high school students and $60 for middle schoolers,” the paper reported. In some school districts, the school supply lists have grown so large that school boards have stepped in and placed caps on how much families should be asked to spend:

“In the suburbs of Rochester, the Gates Chilli Central School District last year capped the amount that parents were expected to spend on supplies at $10 a child, adding $100,000 to the budget to make up the difference. The sprawling Fayette County Public Schools in Lexington, Ky., set the limit this fall of $120 a child for the year, including field trips.”

Item #2: How Palin Does It

Answer (according to press reports): Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has a husband named Todd. Who’s the father of their five kids. Who works part-time. And takes care of the children (all but the baby and the eldest – who’s deploying to Iraq this month – are in school all day). The Palin family, you see, works together. Just like the Obama family, only no one’s asking Barack Obama how he’s managing to parent his two school-aged daughters while he’s on the campaign trail. So let’s back off the Palin-is-a-bad-mom garbage, why don’t we. It’s an unbecomingly sexist attack. ‘Nuf said.

Item #3: ‘Hockey Mom’ Humor

The line of the night, as Sarah Palin accepted the Republican’s VP nomination: “You know [what] they say [is] the difference between a hockey mom and a pit-bull? [*pause*] Lipstick.”

Palin’s speech — including the lipstick comment, at 8:50 – can be found here.

There they go again.

Savaging a working mother of small children for her choices instead of just trying to understand her decisions and realize that each family and each woman is very, very different.

This time it’s GOP VP nominee, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a mother of five, who’s in the cross-hairs. She had a baby in April. And returned to work days after giving birth. Before the birth, Palin reportedly got on an airplane while her amniotic fluid was leaking after consulting with her doctor. Now, because she went back to work, because she boarded that plane and because she’s got a baby and is running for vice president, people are all over her. Calling her a bad mom and questioning her competency, particularly because her 4-month-old has Down Syndrome. (And I’m not even talkin’ about Palin’s policy positions, qualifications or her teenage daughter’s private situation which even her opponent says should be kept out of the political arena. Let’s leave those items aside and focus on the attacks on her bio.)

Today’s New York Times has a page one story about what they coyly dubbed, “The Mommy Wars: Special Campaign Edition:”

“. . . [T]his time the battle lines are drawn inside out, with social conservatives, usually staunch advocates for stay-at-home motherhood, mostly defending [Palin], while some others, including plenty of working mothers, worry that she is taking on too much.”

The article continued:

“In interviews, many women, citing their own difficulties with less demanding jobs, said it would be impossible for Ms. Palin to succeed both at motherhood and in the nation’s second-highest elected position at once . . . Many women expressed incredulity — some of it polite, some angry — that Ms. Palin would pursue the vice presidency given her younger son’s age and condition.”

(more…)

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.