Some children have memories of lazy Saturday mornings eating cereal, watching cartoons, and lounging around in their pajamas.
For better or worse, that will not be my children. Oh, don’t worry, they watch more than enough t.v.—I think I’d rather be hit in the head with a mallet than watch The Wiggles Live one more time—but Saturdays as the children of a political candidate with a working wife are a different cup of tea. This Saturday, we have a full agenda. First, we will be visiting with our friends at the A. Philip Randolph Institute at the Longshoreman’s Hall in Wilmington. The APRI is a national organization of black trade unionists, and I have been attending its meetings pretty regularly for years. I will be briefing them on our new credit scoring bill, and trying to enlist their help in our campaign to enroll more children in the CHIP health insurance program. Then the boys and I will head up to Rodney Square, where the boys will eat lunch and I will be the guest of honor at the 2007 Family Safety and Health Fair, a daylong event dedicated to promoting safety and crime prevention in the City of Wilmington. As guest of honor, I will be demonstrating my techniques for disarming a potential mugger through karate blows to nerve centers.
Next will come a nap. For most of us, this would be a welcome interlude. For Adam, that is also the case. But for Zach, the declaration of naptime is the initiation of a long twilight struggle. We have, over the last two and a half years, employed a variety of tactics to induce drowsiness: driving in circles, getting in bed with him and holding him down, and the infamous “up down” where I literally hold him and squat up and down until I am going to collapse. Unless he is too tired to resist, nothing works—and come 6:00 or 6:30, when he is so exhausted he can’t see straight, we all pay a heavy price. So if you are at either event on Saturday morning, I encourage you to chase him in circles.
Following the nap, we will pick up Mrs. Denn and it is off to Seaford for the AFRAM festival, and then over to Rehoboth for the annual Stonewall Democrats fundraiser at Dr. Jim D’Orta’s house. And then, like all other kids in America, the boys will have their diapers changed and get into their pajamas in the back of the Pacifica parked along Silver Lake in Rehoboth, fall asleep in their car seats on the way home, and get carried up to bed. Fifteen or twenty years from now, we will find out how this all worked out.
For better or worse, that will not be my children. Oh, don’t worry, they watch more than enough t.v.—I think I’d rather be hit in the head with a mallet than watch The Wiggles Live one more time—but Saturdays as the children of a political candidate with a working wife are a different cup of tea. This Saturday, we have a full agenda. First, we will be visiting with our friends at the A. Philip Randolph Institute at the Longshoreman’s Hall in Wilmington. The APRI is a national organization of black trade unionists, and I have been attending its meetings pretty regularly for years. I will be briefing them on our new credit scoring bill, and trying to enlist their help in our campaign to enroll more children in the CHIP health insurance program. Then the boys and I will head up to Rodney Square, where the boys will eat lunch and I will be the guest of honor at the 2007 Family Safety and Health Fair, a daylong event dedicated to promoting safety and crime prevention in the City of Wilmington. As guest of honor, I will be demonstrating my techniques for disarming a potential mugger through karate blows to nerve centers.
Next will come a nap. For most of us, this would be a welcome interlude. For Adam, that is also the case. But for Zach, the declaration of naptime is the initiation of a long twilight struggle. We have, over the last two and a half years, employed a variety of tactics to induce drowsiness: driving in circles, getting in bed with him and holding him down, and the infamous “up down” where I literally hold him and squat up and down until I am going to collapse. Unless he is too tired to resist, nothing works—and come 6:00 or 6:30, when he is so exhausted he can’t see straight, we all pay a heavy price. So if you are at either event on Saturday morning, I encourage you to chase him in circles.
Following the nap, we will pick up Mrs. Denn and it is off to Seaford for the AFRAM festival, and then over to Rehoboth for the annual Stonewall Democrats fundraiser at Dr. Jim D’Orta’s house. And then, like all other kids in America, the boys will have their diapers changed and get into their pajamas in the back of the Pacifica parked along Silver Lake in Rehoboth, fall asleep in their car seats on the way home, and get carried up to bed. Fifteen or twenty years from now, we will find out how this all worked out.
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