so, i can't be certain... but i'm pretty sure i see a glimpse of teen mia in this picture...

for some reason, i was practically giddy about election day yesterday.. and knew i wanted to rope the kids in on the election night results.  for one, history would have been made either way.  and for two, i needed a disney channel free night with no complaints.

so after i picked kayli up from school, i explained to her how i wanted to have a family election night party and asked for her help brainstorming.  that's always the first best step in roping her in to my schemes.  isabel joined in the plans after we picked her up, and we headed off to the grocery store.  we were still undecided how to mark off the electoral college votes, but i knew that's what i wanted to count/note rather than the state's that were taken.  we decided on red and blue icing dots on cookies.  i was not prepared to make 500 cookies, so we looked at the EC map and saw that 3-5 was the lowest amount of votes a state could have.  we decided to max each cookie out at 5 dots.

90 cookies later, i was hoping that it wasn't neck and neck all night!  we looked at past election results and i showed them how the EC vote and the popular vote can differ but only the EC counts.  we looked up to see if Obama would be the youngest president which took us down to Roosevelt and Kennedy.  we found out that Obama's daughters were almost the same ages as my 2, which was fun.  when the coverage actually started, i was in the other room and was so proud when kayli excitedly yelled, "mom, come quick!  it's finally starting!"

kayli had voted for Obama in her school election, so she was cheering for him and took the blue dots.  until he got past 100 and then she gave up and switched to red, lol.  here's our cookie results at about 7:15 CST last night.. this was before kayli switched camps.  i think there's about 78 blue votes there
 

the girls watched the texas race with interest and learned that when 1% of precincts are reporting, it's not always indicative of final results!  they had to go to bed before anything was officially announced, but by that time we had seen the CNN announcers show that McCain would have to win EVERY state outside of CA, WA, and OR and still would not have enough votes.  so they felt pretty certain of the results when bedtime came around.

kayli got up first thing this morning to check the results and was excited to tell me that Obama had won by over 300 EC votes.  she also watched his acceptance speech online and thought it was great fun that he promised his daughters a puppy in the white house.

overall, a roaring success for election fun! 
i'm so proud of my kiddos!