My Own Little Piece Of History

I don't know exactly where my fervor for voting comes from, but I distinctly remember my mother taking me along with her to vote. In fact, sitting in a polling place on a bright November morning as my mother disappeared behind a red, white and blue striped curtain for a few moments may be one of my earliest memories. So, I attribute my firm belief that voting is vital and that if you don't vote, I will refuse to listen to you complain about our governing officials to these early memories of participating in our political process.

Despite one of my sisters exhorting everyone she came in to even distant contact with to "bring water, bring lawn chairs, and dress in layers" when heading to the polls today (and my reminding her that, hey, we live in NEW HAMPSHIRE where uhm I can't honestly foresee any major voting issues arising), we had no issues at our polling location today (and neither did anyone I spoke with). In fact, we waited in line longer when voting in the primary in January (when it was pretty damn cold). She was adamant, too, that we not bring the kids with us because it would just be too much for them to take. Needless to say, she was wrong...sort of. But, even though they may not remember it, I was determined to have our children with us as we cast our votes for Barack Obama.

As we waited for all of two minutes in line to announce ourselves, Ella suddenly became possessed by evil Republican spirits or something and became nearly uncontrollable. I switched kids with J and he was strapped with wrangling the inexplicably insane one. Liam was pretty well behaved until he decided that he just had to touch the boot of the man in the booth next to me because he was convinced that it was Daddy's boot. I told him repeatedly that it wasn't in fact the foot of his father at all and hastily filled out the rest of my ballot (while also listening to Ella freak the hell out two booths over). Despite a complete stranger offering to hold Ella while J voted (hello? who would ever do that? offer and/or accept the offer?), we both placed our ballots into the machine and left the polling place, happy to have played our tiny roles in history.

Yes, we did.