The Microphone Hog (a multitasking post)

Today’s Motherhood Moment comes to you from the floor of the Missouri House of Representatives.

I don’t talk politics very often here, because frankly, I find the system flawed and self-defeating, and political discourse inevitably makes everyone angry. But we actually have a connection to politics in our family. My mother has been a state representative for eight years, which means she is term limited out as of tomorrow, when session closes.

For the past five years, every spring I have taken the kids to Jeff City to visit Grandma at the Capitol. Every year, she introduces them on the House floor at the start of the day’s session and makes them “honorary pages” for the day.

Well, this year, with two walkers and a wiggler, it was not easy to corral the kids in the wings of the House floor. Alex wanted to climb on the base of the marble columns and go around and around them; Julianna wanted to take off on her Miss America schtick, and Nicholas just wanted to explore. He condescended to be held by his grandma, who took him out onto the floor with her and stood at the microphone, waiting for the speaker to acknowledge her.

“Lady from Randolph, for what purpose do you rise?”

“Mr. Speaker, I would like…”

And at this point, Nicholas thought, Hey, what is that thing? That looks totally awesome! So he grabbed the mic and shoved it away.

Mom pulled it back and started again. “I would like to…”

Shove. Chuckles begin rippling through the hall—which is really saying something, because if you’ve never been there, you might not realize that nobody ever listens to anything anyone is saying. They just all carry on their own conversations in the wings until the speaker bangs the gavel and tells them all to shut up. But I digress. At last, Mom just decided she had to do the best she could. It sounded something like this over the PA system: “I would (mumble mumble) my grandchildren (mumble mumble) Alex, Juli (mumble mumble)  and Nicholas, with their (mumble mumble) Kate.”

“Looks like you have some good help there,” the Speaker said, and everyone applauded—including Nicholas:

So I’m going to break all the laws of blogging and tack on another topic to the end of today’s Motherhood Moment. Today’s You Capture theme, over at I Should Be Folding Laundry, is “yellow.” And if I didn’t have these pretty pictures to share, I would just let it go…but I do have pretty pictures, so here you go:

What is YOUR parenting moment of the week?