To Be President

We have two school-aged children who are learning about the governmental process at school.   They have each come home wanting to talk about the current election, asking questions to help them understand.   They know there was more than one election and were interested to know about one of the candidates, asking if he’d won.  

My son has a classmate who’s father was running for state senate and he did win the seat.   He was running for re-election so the children have heard about him in the past.   We had a discussion with them about how he was a state senator, not a congressional senator.  That sparked more questions which my husband did a good job of explaining. 

My daughter’s school had no specific guidance about how we, as parents, might support our children during the election with questions.  My son’s head of school sent out a nice email about respectfulness of other’s thoughts and opinions and asked that we help our children understand that differing opinions are important and should be respected.  It was a very well-written, “we should all play nice” email and I liked that the school was trying to encourage it. 

Tonight at dinner the conversation invariably got around to the presidential race.   The children knew there was a lot of counting of votes going on and we might not know the winner for some time.   My son said that no, they had the finals now (he was looking at Alexa’s screen) so my husband jumped in and explained how it was almost certain, although there were reasons recounts would be done like if a state was very close in votes or if a candidate contested the count.   Even so, my husband said, there wasn’t a big chance things would turn out differently.

The conversation then shifted to George Washington and how many terms a president could serve.   As the conversation was winding down my daughter said, “Actually, I’m going to try and be president.”

The Big Boy Update:  My son wants you to play Minecraft with him.   What he really wants to do is play the show off everything he knows game.   I told him it was fun for only so long with someone who played like that and if he wanted his father and me to play with him, he might want to consider that. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was more cautious for a while after breaking her arm—which I continue to forget is broken she’s done so well with it—but today she is back to her risk-taking, full-tilt, on top of the swing set and trying to do flips on the trampoline self again.   I hope she heals from this break before the next calamity occurs, at least.