that diary and loved it!

Simone is taking an interest in the election.  She knows Clinton, Edwards and Obama, but strongly supports Obama.  I've made an error, though, in trumping up that George Bush doesn't make good choices.  He's her boogyman.  I tell her that maybe he and Cheney didn't get enough hugs when they were little boys, and if we wish good things for them they might get better.  As if.  But it's only slightly more implausible then Santa, and I tell her he's real.

I still have vivid memories of being allowed to stay up late to watch my first election returns at age 11.  My state was one of the first to report and the first blue on the map.  And then I saw the map go red red red red red red red red red red red red . . . . I was stunned.  I'd never heard of anyone supporting Nixon's reelection.  I had settled in to watch the McGovern victory with no thought of a possible alternate outcome.  I don't think I've ever recovered.

That is fantastic.  All my 5yo comments about these days is that we are getting rid of "the worstest president ever" pretty soon.

my kids follow it some; they don't like Bush and think he does bad things [hmmm, wonder where they got that idea]

We always took them with us to vote until they were in school on voting day. We still take them on local elections that are on Saturdays.

My first election memory is the 1968 election. My parents talked politics a lot [from the Republican side, though]. We talk politics a lot in our household, too, so my kids are exposed to our ideas but they also know that their grandparents think differently -- so I think they don't go off expressing their opinions to everyone.

I volunteered in my daughter's class a couple of weeks before winter break and one of her classmates [female] told me that Hillary Clinton should not be president because women just make crazy decisions sometimes. She said her mother had told her this. Well, I told her that many countries had women leaders [and named some] and that while there may be other reasons not to vote for Hillary, this was not one IMO.

When I was a kid, had to be before school age, I used to think that Ronald Reagan was a family friend, because my parents talked about him so much: "Did you hear what Reagan said?", "Did you see that thing about Reagan?", that kind of conversational snippet all the time. This was when he was governor of California.

So who knows what kids are taking away from these conversations :).