Praise Song for Watching the Inaguration With Your 2-Year-Old

Many things are not the same when you have children. I can now add viewing the inauguration to that list. I thought I was pretty sly manipulating Henry's nap so that he was asleep during the swearing in, but that still left me with Max. We started off with a screaming fit because he wanted to watch Little Einsteins instead of "the news." I calmed him down by giving him a giant bag of pretzels (I'm not above bribery, people,) which got us through until the first couple minutes of Obama's speech. At this point, Max announced that he needed to poop. For those of you following this potty-training saga, you will know that Max's timing is always impeccable. I had to pause the speech (thank God for Tivo!) and take Max upstairs for the whole involved potty ritual (take off pants and underwear, sit on potty, ask for, "A couple privacy", finally poop, wipe, puts pants and underwear back on, admire poop, flush poop, choose stickers, place stickers on chart, wash hands, dry hands, get sidetracked into trying to play with bath toys, yell angrily when mom removes from bathroom and hauls downstairs, etc). We went back to watching the speech and actually made it through (despite 800 questions on Max's part. "Who is that guy?" "What are they doing?" "Is that guy playing an instrument?") before Henry woke up and started crying upstairs. I'm sure that Max won't remember this moment, but in the years to come, I will enjoy telling him the story about how we watched President Obama take office together. I will also enjoy telling him about how embarassed I was several hours later when we were having lunch with a friend in San Francisco and Max saw an African-American guy in a tie and exclaimed, "Mommy, is that Barack Obama." I don't think the guy heard him.