YES, WE DID!!

This morning, I woke up with a song in my head. "Feeling Good," by Michael Bublé, to be exact, with these magical words:

It's a new dawn
It's a new day...

It is a new dawn, indeed.

Last night was awesome. I feel like I lived through history, and I shared it all with my son.

I took Mark voting with me, and I would've let him ink the Barack Obama bubble except I thought it might invalidate my ballot. ("You can fill out your own ballot when you're 18," I told him, and he replied, "Awwww!")

After Mark's drum lessons, we got ice cream and settled in at home to watch the election results. We listened as analysts counted electoral college votes, which I explained to Mark. ("Once upon a time, our forefathers thought we were too stupid to vote, so they created the electoral college...") Mark was more interested in his ice cream than in electoral votes.

It was just a lot of cautious speculation, until 8 p.m. Charlie Gibson of ABC announced the polls were closing out West in less than a minute, but it was too soon to call the race, so stay tuned. I flipped to MSNBC, and suddenly, the screen was filled with people dancing, crying, and cheering. The caption read, "NBC News proclaims Barack Obama the winner!" or something to that effect, and in the corner, it had his electoral college votes at 284.

I immediately flipped back to ABC, which showed similar images of overjoyed people. Somehow we missed the announcement, even though we'd been glued to the T.V. for two hours!

But the announcement didn't matter--what mattered was that Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States, and man, we were happy!

"Do the happy dance, Mark!" I shouted, but he told me to go first. So I did, pulling out my silliest dance moves, while he laughed at me. Then he started jumping on the couch, and I didn't even care. "WOO HOO!" he cheered, jumping to the loveseat, and I cheered with him. We sounded like a couple of wild banshees.

The phone rang, and I revelled in the great news with Edra, Vic, Kathleen, Nicky, and Kelley. We were all ecstatic. Mark was still screaming, and I had to shush him a few times.

He settled down long enough to watch McCain's concession speech. I thought it was a very nice speech, and said what a good sport he was. They showed a teary Sarah Palin, and I told Mark, "She's crying because right now she's thinking, 'I don't wanna go back to Alaska.'"

When Obama finally came on at 9 p.m., poor Mark was fighting to stay awake. He laid down, and when I asked if he wanted to go to bed, he nodded yes.

"Too bad!" I said. "You're watching history!"

But I left him alone, and five minutes into the speech, he fell fast asleep. I was bummed he didn't hear the speech, but I'll play it for him later. The important thing was that we celebrated together.

Next stop, Washington D.C. on January 20th, 2009. The living history lesson is taking a road trip--look for us in the crowd...