The Road to the White House

Anyone who knows O well knows that he wants to be The President of the United States when he grows up. Well, he took his first step toward that goal this week, winning his first ever election! He will be proudly representing his classroom at his elementary school's Student Council . Thought you all might enjoy reading his self-penned campaign speech...

I think Student Council is very important because it helps make school decisions. I’m concerned about some school decisions, and I want to help make good ones. I believe I can handle the responsibility.

I have done some things in and out of school that I think will help me be a good student council member. At Cub Scouts, I have learned to always do my best. I am a responsible and safe member of the Safety Patrol. And I try hard to follow the Canavan Code.

I’m also interested in politics and how governments work. This is my first step into my campaign to be President of the United States in 2036.

Just imagine what the kid will do with speech writers!

Fun o' Plenty in Week Two

June 11th--Because it was O's BFF Jeff who staged this shot, I'm pretty sure one clone trooper is telling the other clone trooper some kind of poop joke. Just a guess...

June 12th--These clowns were my lunchdates. Then O & I headed to the First Ladies' National Historic Site for a(nother) tour of the Saxton House. Happy Birthday to Mrs. McKinley!

June 13th--Where else can you get face-painted with a Village People fumanchu moustache and retrieve giant Pez from a paper-mache Barack Obama Pez dispenser?

Parade the Circle+festival+the Hursts=GREAT FUN!!

June 14th--O got to have tons of fun today, but all we got to do was paint the dining room.

June 15th--Who ya gonna call? Your buddy Alex, whose grandpa has a friend who owns THE Ghostbusters car. O and pals got to go on the ride of their lives!

June 16th--Checking out the swimming lake with Baba.

Verdict: squishy and stinky. Digging in the sand on the shore is tons-o-fun, though!

June 17th--Maggie's SpongeBob birthday fiesta!

Week One, Summer of Fun II

This year I want to better document our Summer of Fun II by taking a picture everyday that sums up where we found our fun. Here is week one...

June 4th--Nothing says summer like a big pile of dirty shoes by the door :) O had friends over today for a fun day of Legos, Star Wars & backyard ball.

June 5th--First dip in the FOHA pool. Very, very, very cold!!

June 6th--SandO at Niagra Falls

June 7th--Chatting with President Millard Fillmore in Forest Lawn Cemetery, Buffalo, NY.

June 8th--Celebrating a great play. Go Giants!

June 9th--Watching Journey to the Center of the Earth. The 3D glasses didn't last long, but we enjoyed the show anyway!

June 10th--Hiking Chippewa Rail Trail

Working the Room

Yesterday afternoon we received one of those automated phone calls from our new Congressman, John Boccieri. He was going to be at the local grocery store this afternoon and invited us to come meet him. So as not to appear rude, we accepted the invitation.

Now it just so happens that our neighbor, Jim, is the manager of said grocery store. So, when the wait for Congressman Boccieri's arrival extended beyond O's patience this afternoon, he headed over to ask Jim if he knew what the hold up was. Well, then they got to talking politics, and next thing you know O is chatting up Boccieri's advance-man, Ray. By the time I wander over to find out what happened to my kid, the three of them are old friends. Ray is telling O the story of how he got into politics and is encouraging him to get to know more of his elected officials. "Ray," I'm thinking, "don't encourage him!!!" Then Ray informs me that O will be the first person to shake Representative Boccieri's hand when he arrives. So, maybe Ray isn't so bad afterall.

Right on cue, Boccieri walks through the sliding grocery store doors and up to Ray, who introduces him to O as I scramble for my camera. They chatted for a few minutes, about our having heard Boccieri stump when we skipped school to see Obama speak, about O's love of American government, and about Boccieri's third grader. Yadda, yadda, yadda....

And as Boccieri is signing an autograph for O, Ray says, "You know, O here wants to be a Congressman someday, too." To which O replies, "No, I want to be President!"

So there, Ray.

January Would've Been Kinda Boring if it Weren't for Cub Scouts!

Thank goodness for Cub Scouts. It's been so cold and snowy that we pretty much only leave the house if we have to, and since O has some kind of activity or meeting or outing each week, it's helping prevent complete cabin fever. So how'd we stay busy in January?

P&O baked and decorated an "A-maze-ing" cake for the pack meeting....




And we celebrated O's big popcorn sales at the Lake Erie Monsters' Scout Day at the Q, where we got to do all kinds of fun things like go on the ice and shoot goals...

and shoot hoops on the Cavs practice court....

Otherwise, we kept busy with swimming two nights a week, Chess club, and playing with friends. Inside. We also spent a lot of time remarking at the incredible amount of snow we've received. It is now up to the bottom of the mailbox and holding. We have a couple of snowpeople and an awesome snow fort decorating the front lawn, too!

We had two wonderfully lazy snow days, during which we stayed in our jammies all day long. We also had a couple of not-so-fun days home with a stomach bug, the silver lining of which was that they were perfectly timed so that O got to watch the inauguration LIVE. That was awesome... well, except for the throwing-up part.

But truly, if it weren't for the bevy of Scout-related activities we've participated in this past month, we would've been bored silly by now! Here's hoping for an early Spring....

Hope, in tents and otherwise

Hope has been all around us lately. It hit a zenith at about 11:01 pm on November 4th, and we're still riding that wave. As my dear friend Jill said, "Hope.... now I have some!" And I believe the text from Patty was, "Wooooooooo Hooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!" So, that about sums it up!!

Then last weekend we delivered our church's Tent of Hope to the National Mall where we set it up with other tents from all over the country. And I gotta say, it's easy to be hopeful when it's 75 and sunny in November! As always, DC brings out the presidential hopes of a certain eight year old boy, and with the excitement over the recent election this was no exception. So there were a lot of "When I'm President..." declarations while we strolled the city. In addition to the Tents of Hope festivities, on this trip we... took in the Pompeii exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, toured the Captial Building (so cool), picked John Jay's nose in the Supreme Court (family tradition), marveled at the Jefferson Memorial, browsed Thomas Jefferson's book collection at the Library of Congress, picniced on the mall, walked the dog, pushed Sophie's stroller all over Pennsylvania Avenue, hung out with our awesome brothers and their fabulous wives, ate too much, slept too little, played Wii, played with Sophie, and had yet another awesome DC weekend. It never disappoints!!

Oh, and we took 587 pictures. Gotta love digital! So P put together a video story with pics from the Gathering of the Tents. Turn up your volume and enjoy!

I'm Barack Obama, and I approve this absence!

Well, way back at the beginning of the presidential campaign, I promised O that we'd go hear his candidate, Barack Obama, before election day. AND TODAY WAS OUR DAY! Here's the story...

I got an email Saturday evening that Sen. Obama would be appearing this morning in Canton. Inside. In a theater. With real seats. Yeah! So, we flew down to Canton right that minute to pick up tickets, just making it to the campaign office before they closed at 8pm. We were literally running down the sidewalk in downtown Canton to make it in time--P sick with a sinus infection, O dressed as Harry Potter because we'd just picked him up from a Halloween party, and me on an amazing adrenaline high! I'm sure we scared all the nice campaign volunteers, but oh well.... we got our tickets! On the way down we'd called the Hursts from our Obamamobile to see if they'd like to come with us for the event, and of course they were in. I figure this kind of history lesson is better than anything the boys would have learned at school today, right?

So this morning O got to come to school with me for awhile because Jeff had to go in to take a science test. O read stories at circle time and helped me help the kids scoop out our class pumpkin. Fun! Then we picked up Jill and went to pick up Jeff from school. Oh, did I mention this was when it started snowing?!?

The doors opened for the event at 10:30 am, which was about an hour before we got in the very long, cold line to wait to get in the building. Things moved much faster than when we went to see Hillary, though, and within 40 minutes or so we were through security. Then we followed the flow of the crowd to our very-far-from-the-stage seats. But at least there were seats!!

There were a few warm-up speakers, most notably John Boccieri (trying to be the first Democrat to represent the 16th district since 1948). Followed by some chanting & a "wave" that took awhile to get going, but ended strong. Yeah for us! Then after a long, dramatic, fifteen minute pause, out came the next president of the United States...

It was a great speech, and longer than I had anticipated. The media was billing it as his "closing arguments" on the campaign, and it lived up to the billing. He covered pretty much everything, in his smooth, elegant style, punctuated by long rounds of applause. It was one of those experiences that's hard to encapsulate, which is not good for a blogger! Suffice it to say that it was all I'd hoped to hear, all I'd hoped O would hear, and what I think we need to hear as a country. Yes, We Can!!

We stuck around awhile afterwards to bask in the glow and check out the press corps. We got interviewed for NewsRadio AM 1480, but I'm sure you all heard that fine piece of journalism already, right?

We also met a very nice Secret Service agent who gave the boys some pins that he produced out of thin air. Seriously, neither Jill nor I could figure out where he got them from! Anyways, it was a long, politically charged day, and an amazing experience for the boys. They will never forget the day their super-cool moms let them skip school to go see history in action.... and that's because we'll never let them forget!!

Bipartisan Spirit

This weekend we trekked to Dixon, Illinois for my Aunt Dorothy's memorial service. Because we were up at the crack of dawn on Saturday (thanks to the time-zone change), we had a little time on our hands before the service. Just enough time, it turned out, to visit the boyhood home of Dixon's most famous son, Ronald Reagan. So in the spirit of bipartisanship, here's a pic to counter the Hillary pic from last week.

And on the right there, you can see that Dixon, being the very respectable Land of Lincoln town that it is, also had a giant Abe statue in its riverfront Presidents Park. A two-fer for presidential photo ops in just one morning!

As for the reason for our trip, I will likely blog about that another day.... it was one of the best funerals I've been to in a long time, a real celebration of Aunt Dorothy & her life. But I'm not quite ready to go there yet today...

"I like your hat!"

"I like your hat!"--Senator Hillary Clinton, to O

After church yesterday we surprised O with a trip to Elyria to hear Hillary Clinton stump for Barack Obama.... true, this may not be what every eight year old thinks of as a fantastic way to spend a Sunday afternoon, but it is definitely this eight year old's idea of a great day! We got to hear many local "dignitaries" speak, plus the President of Puerto Rico. Muy bueno! After awhile, this got really long & boring, but he held in there through all two hours of speeches until Hillary took the stage, and that doesn't count the 45 minutes we waited in line outside to get in! We were sort of stage-left (if you consider behind the left side of the stage as stage-left), so we got to see lots of the backs of politicians' heads and lots of Secret Service activity. Pretty cool!

After Hillary's speech, we headed over stage right, where it seemed she would be exiting. Then, when she started signing autographs, we worked our way to the front of the pack. From his excellent perch on P's shoulders, O was able to get Hillary's attention. As she reached to grab the paper he was holding out, she noticed his "Seal of the President of the United States" hat that I bought him at the Ford Museum. She looked right in his little eyes and said, "I like your hat!" and gave him a big smile. And it became one of the best days EVER!!