Guns and Mocktails

I'm watching the election results roll in after a long day of voting, some election-related activities, and too much togetherness. After we dropped off the Baby at school, I took the Boy and the Girl with me to our new polling place. The parking lot was pretty empty, so I thought we'd timed it well. What I failed to notice was that a bus from a local retirement home was unloading some dedicated senior citizen voters. Now, I hope that I will live long enough to join the ranks of senior citizens one day, but I have to say that they gummed up the works a bit. Slow as Christmas, as the K says.

When we finished voting I was sure to tell the Boy and the Girl that they were "great Americans." To which the Boy responded, "I'm the most American in the family. Because I look the most American." I had to laugh, because, on the one hand he's kind of right. The Boy has dark blonde hair, freckles, blue eyes, and is missing a front tooth. So, at the moment, he does look like the kind of kid pictured in a Norman Rockwell painting. But, no matter, I launched into a big lecture about how no one can "look American" except for the Native Americans. I'm sure they tuned me out before I even opened my mouth to explain.

When we got home from voting, I was doing my usual multitasking (which means I did a lot of things badly) and was not watching the Boy and the Girl very carefully. When I went into the Girl's room to make her bed, I saw that they had been creating some crazy structures out of Dado Cubes. Of course they abandoned the project and left the remains all over the Girl's bedroom floor. Then I saw this sign taped to the wall:

Let me translate: Guns ex Introducing Super Sales! (our address) from November 6th to tenth. Then there's a picture of a gun and the arrow with Below are Sales written above the arrow. So, apparently I am raising two junior arms dealers. At least the sign didn't say, "no background check necessary." I guess someone's been telling them about their second amendment rights.

I am not sure where this fascination with guns came from, but, I'm not entirely surprised. The Girl has long expressed her feeling that the Girl Scout are inferior to the Boy Scouts because "the Girl Scouts just sell cookies, while the Boy Scouts get weapons." I'm not sure she's got the full story on the armed Boy Scouts. And because the Boy doesn't know the difference between toilet paper and paper towels, the thought of a whole bunch of similarly observant fully armed boys seems like an incredibly bad idea. But, the Girl seems to handle firearms pretty handily. Here she is this past summer, getting in some target practice in Maine:

That's not a bad picture. Maybe I should go back to Instagram. Should I worry about any of this? Should I wait until she says that she wants to be a defense contractor when she grows up or gets a "from my cold dead hands" bumper sticker for her scooter?

Moving on, after we picked up the baby at school we decided to make our red, white, and blue mocktail. I saw this through a link on the Dixie Delights blog and we decided to give it a try. So, the idea is that you have fruit punch (we used cran-raspberry juice because that's what I have), blue Gatorade, and diet Sprite. Fill a glass about 1/3 with ice cubes and pour in the juice. Fill the next 1/3 with ice cubes and slowly pour in the Gatorade, finally, fill the last 1/3 with ice and pour in the diet Sprite. It should look like this:

It actually worked pretty well (back pat). The liquids stay separate because they're different densities and the sugar content is different in all three - the juice has the most sugar and the diet Sprite, of course, has the least.

We were pretty proud of ourselves because I warned them to expect a nice shade of lavender.

From the looks of things, I will be going to bed before this election is called for either candidate, which is just fine by me. I'm sure many of you will agree with me that the best part of a vicious election is being finished. Happy Election Night!

Vote!

Here is the obligatory election day post. I grew up around politics. My father's highest and best compliment has always been, "Susie, you are a great American." Mom worked in D.C. right out of college and may or may not have been hit on in an elevator by a Kennedy. When I was three I asked my parents what happens when a democrat marries a republican.  They laughed and told their friends, but I don't think I ever received an adequate response.  As an adult, I think what happens is that one of them converts, just like if they were different religions.  It would be cool if there was a big ceremony where one of them wore all blue or red (depending on the conversion, of course) and got dunked in chardonnay or BBQ sauce or something.  But, alas the conversion is only apparent in the privacy of the voting booth.

I know that political differences can be a big problem for families. But, it has never proved a problem for my immediate family, and I don't think it's because we agree on every issue, because we don't. I think it's because it's the political positioning and dynamics in politics itself that interests us. Not that we don't have our issues about which we feel passionately, because we do. I just think that interest in the political process supersedes the individual issues.

This spring we went up to Washington, D.C. during spring break.  Sister lives and works in D.C. and Dad happened to be there for work while we were visiting.  Sister hooked us up with some fun tours of the White House and we went bowling in the OEOB.  Dad gave the children and me an awesome tour of the Capitol.  Dad knows how to hit the highlights for kids: location of the 1983 bomb explosion, crazy-looking leper guy from Hawaii in Statuary Hall (see Father Damien below), and the blood stained steps where William Taulbee was shot by Charles Kincaid.

When I asked the kids what they enjoyed most about our trip to D.C., the Baby volunteered, "riding the escalator with Granddad." That's when I realized that the interest in politics may skip a generation. The Girl's class, as I mentioned, has been studying the democratic process and politics. Dad happened to be visiting us and the Girl asked if he could come and talk to her class about the election. Woo Boy! Because Dad has some credentials that technically make him an expert on American politics, the school seemed to think it would be okay to unleash him on the Girl's third grade class.

You would be surprised (or maybe not) about the things that the kids wanted to know. For example, Dad spent a lot of time fielding questions about how Barack and Michelle Obama met, where they were working, what they were wearing when they met. It was like a bunch of teenage girls interrogating one of their own about her first date. At least once during this line of questioning, Dad punted to me, asking, "Suse, when did Obama graduate from Harvard?" All I can say is thank goodness for Google on my iPhone.

Midway through his "lecture" Dad made the mistake of saying that Romney would probably win our home state of Georgia. For the entire rest of Dad's talk, all the kids wanted was to name a state and have Dad predict who would win it in the election. Basically, they would have preferred it if he had been a fortune teller. I was just waiting for one of them to ask Dad who would win the Florida-Georgia game and then make a quick call to his bookie.

The Boy and the Girl don't have school on election day, so I'm going to take them with me when I vote. I always loved going with my parents to vote and not just because of the PTA bake sale that was held at the polling place. There was something about going into the booth, drawing the curtain and pushing the levers that made me feel so important. Even if my kids don't have the interest in politics that my parents had and passed to Sister and me (well, mostly Sister), I hope that they will realize the importance of voting. I hope that they feel important and like their opinion matters when they help me cast my vote tomorrow. I know that after we vote, I'll give them both hugs and tell them in my best Dad voice, "You are both great Americans." Happy election day!

Get Out the Vote

The Girl has the most amazing teacher this year. She is young and energetic and fabulous in every way except one. Her birthday is tomorrow. My birthday was two days ago and Mom's birthday is Sunday. Later this month we have the Girl's birthday and the Baby's birthday. Makes you wonder what was in the water in February and March (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). Shaking off my birthday fatigue, I put together a basket for her from the class:

Pretty cute if you're not into symmetry, which apparently I am not. If you'll notice there are handles on the sides of the bucket and the bow is way closer to one handle than the other. Also, the bow itself is a bit wonky. It's like I get *this* close to making something really good and then, wah, wah, wah, it's not to be. Also, I think you can see my legs reflected in the bucket. Although it looks like I am midway through some sort of Charleston move, I can assure you that I was not dancing while snapping the photo. It takes all my concentration to take a photo this bad. Despite the less than professional presentation, I hope that she enjoys the contents of the gift basket. Starbucks gift card (what's not to like about a pumpkin latte other than they are 320 calories a pop?), bag of Ghirardelli dark chocolate (my favorite), gift certificate to Jazmin Spa, and a gorgeous silk scarf that another student's mom picked up on a recent trip to China.

This week also marked the date of the class's learning celebrations (we aren't allowed to say "party" anymore) and guess who was in charge? That's right, yours truly. Instead of a blog, this really might just be a daily record of my nervous breakdown. If it gets too bad, I hope y'all will stage an intervention. The Girl's class has been studying American government so I decided we should have an election-themed learning celebration.  Since they've been studying the difference between direct and representative democracy, we had a little mock election in which we voted once as you would in a direct democracy and once as a representative democracy. Mo Rocco did a similar exercise in a segment on Sunday Morning. (As an aside, did y'all know that former Sunday Morning anchor, Charles Kuralt had a secret family? It's always the ones you'd least suspect.)

Instead of voting for the actual candidates, which we thought would be too controversial, we opted to have the kids vote for their favorite candy between sour gummy bears and Skittles. First we had the kids vote and we counted up the total number of votes for each candy-date (ha, ha). It was looking good for team sour gummy bears, which led by a 2-1 margin. Then, they broke into tables and filled out ballots to vote again, as a table for their favorite. I made the ballots:

Each table selected an elector to announce the majority vote at the table. Again, the sour gummy bears took it, with four tables in camp sour gummy bear, versus only one table for Skittles. In the Sunday Morning clip it works out that the election results are different under the direct democratic vote then they are under the representative vote. Our results were the same, but I just explained that that's the way it usually works out in the United States. It would have been more illustrative if the results differed, but I wasn't about to gerrymander the tables to accomplish that.

As a reward for doing their civic duty, the kids got stickers:

And snacks:

Perhaps the milk chocolate and white chocolate dipped pretzels were a bad choice on my part. There were several comments that if you picked the white chocolate, you were for Romney and if you picked the milk, you were for Obama. Oh, kids! They do say the darndest things! They also, of course, got to eat the candy-dates, which made the election better than any one in which I've participated. I realize that makes me sound like a cannibal, which I am not. The "recipe" for the pretzels is really like microwave some chocolate chips and dip the pretzels in the chocolate and dip it in the sprinkles. Not much to it, but if you're paranoid that you'd screw it up somehow, here's the recipe. It's from the Lady Paula Deen and it doesn't even involve butter!

We finished up with an election-themed word search that I printed off some website as an afterthought:

If I were to do this again, I would have a couple of different voting choices. The entire activity took about 15 minutes (not including the snack) and it would have been nice to stretch it out a bit longer. So, maybe start with markers and colored pencils and then hit them with the candy as a bonus. I scoured the Internet and Pinterest for a lesson plan that had an interesting activity for the election and honestly, I didn't find anything that wouldn't have forced me to basically teach the students a class on election law. That wasn't happening, so this turned out to be a good compromise, a little bit didactic, a little bit fun. (Wasn't that a Donnie and Marie song?) Speaking of teaching and lesson plans, my friend Shannon has started a blog called Tags 4 Teachers to help teachers find lesson plans and activities. Check it out teachers and room mom-types! Have a great weekend and keep on keeping on brave New Yorkers and Jerseyites. We're thinking about you!