Now don't you feel better?

This year is a big year - it's a presidential voting year.

We've been trying to instill in the kids the importance of being informed, making wise decision, and performing civic duties. There is so much energy and tension everywhere about the candidates that even the kids have taken notice.

It would have been a great object lesson to have taken all our brewd to the polling center, standing in line for three hours in the rain, and then letting them stand on the other side of the curtain while we made our voting decision, but we thought that our sanity weighed a little bit heavier than a great object lesson opportunity and we did the early voting at home.

It was so much easier! We had a voters guide that Washington state mailed out to every household with descriptions of all the people and things we were voting about, and we had the internet readily available for us to search out each person's political stance on the issues we were most concerned about. You don't get THAT behind that little curtain at the polling center!

There were things on the Washington ballot that surprised me a little. We were voting whether to legalize gay marriage or not, which I already have firm beliefs about, but the wording was so awkward that I had to reread it a couple of times to make sure I was marking the right spot. It spoke about voting for the religious freedom of clergymen not to perform the weddings; for me that was a yes, but it was piggybacked on the vote for gay marriage. So if you voted yes to one, it would be yes to the other as well. We also voted on whether we wanted to legalize marijuana, and if we wanted charter schools in Washington. It was a fun ballot to fill out - full of excitement and variety.

It took both of us a little while to get through our last minute researching of the different state and federal level candidates, but we did each compete our whole ballots and sealed them in their peak-proof, double envelopes.

Now they are off in the mail, headed to that great big sorting room in wherever-land be counted, and the kids got to see the whole process from the comfort of our own little schoolroom.

I asked Scott to pose with me and our ballots and he couldn't understand why I was asking that of him. So he decided to do a mug shot pose with his...whatever works!