I’ve decided today that Sarah Palin is sort of a genius.

Unless the real reason she’s stepping down is that the National Enquirer is about to publish a cover story revealing that she’s actually a man who became a woman to escape his history as a Sandinista guerilla fighter, her resignation is flat-out brilliant. It’s certainly possible that she’s leaving her post in advance of some big, ugly, serious scandal becoming public, but I suspect not. And if not, then she’s made the best political move I can imagine in her plan to run for president in 2012.

Whenever I make a big decision, or help someone else make a decision, I always ask this question first, “what’s the downside?” If we ask that question about Sarah Palin’s decision to resign, there really isn’t one of any consequence. Sure, some (not all) Alaskans will be irritated. And some Americans will consider her a quitter. But as Palin begins to build her national organization in earnest, the pissy Alaskans will be equivalent to a few political gnats, and the folks in the lower 48 who will express their disapproval of her resignation don’t like Palin anyway, no matter what she does.

So those are the negatives. If there is any other downside, I am not seeing it. And of course, we Americans have a short attention span, and the “quitter” label just won’t carry any weight within a year, particularly since Palin is now an iconic figure who transcends any single action she takes.. Given who she is, and the passions she stirs in people, the relatively dull, bureaucratic fact that she decided to leave office early really won’t factor in the grand scheme of the Palin narrative

So what are the benefits to Palin? They are huge. First of all, her resignation offers the very basic positive of immediately freeing her from the ethical and logistical constraints that come with her office; as givernor, she can’t leave Alaska too often. She can’t raise money as easily. She has to deal with day to day tasks of actually governing, and she has to face the press scrutiny that comes with being a high-profile, sitting public official.

So Palin resigns yesterday, pointing to the truly unprecedented way she continues to be trashed in the media. She frames it as “best for Alaskans,” saying that the press has essentially driven her from office, and noting that she’s doing the honorable thing by walking away so that Alaskan government can regain some sense of peace and normalcy. Plus, even as she claims that her family’s privacy continues to be violated, she explicitly reminds us that her toddler has Down Syndrome, and she gets Good Mother points by saying she needs to spend more time with him.

Both the suggestion that she’s basically been forced out of office by the liberal media, and her stated plan to be some version of the saintly stay-at-home mama galvanize her admittedly limited, but very enthusiastic and cohesive base: the rightest of right wing Republicans, plus Evangelical Christians. They love her already; now she becomes a crusading martyr with a story to tell, and a comeback to plan. While her base doesn’t actually have enough votes on their own to get her elected, she can spend the next 18 months wringing every last penny they have to give out of them, money she can then parlay into a more comprehensive and well-financed campaign organization that will do its job of turning that money into votes outside of her base. For the next year and a half, Palin will be on the road continuously, speaking, rallying and passing the hat at churches, pro-life meetings, and gun advocacy groups. And when she’s not out there rallying her activist footsoldiers, she reinforces her mainstream GOP street cred with occasional Fox News analysis gigs.

It’s brilliant, I tell you.

Don’t underestimate Sarah Palin. Any woman who can calmly stare down David Letterman, without blinking, forcing a humiliating public apology out of a man who routinely makes lesser mortals weep via his withering excoriation is a woman with a plan. A big plan.

You wait and see.

We have three dogs: Fiat, Mabel and Leo. Although I love all of them, one is far superior to the other two, and that’s what I’m blogging about over at Babble today.

A lovely but very shy black and white border collie has taken up residence on our porch this morning. He (she?) looks like a very nice purebred BC, and is wearing a collar with a tag.

I snapped this photo.

Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, he would not let us touch him in order to see what’s on the tag. But he still wanted to stay on the porch - nearby, but not letting us pet him. We set out some food and water for him, which he gobbled up, but then we had to leave for work. I suspect he will be waiting for us on the porch when we get home.

Please forward to anyone who might help us figure out where this dog belongs. I am sure his owners are frantic.

If you recognize him, email me at katie.granju@gmail.com and I will tell you where you can find him.

I am a bit baffled why Michael Jackson would spend his entire life telling us that his father was an abusive ass, aided and abetted by his mother, who never did anything substantive to stop the child abuse, but then name his parents as his own children’s guardians in his will.

I hope someone in the California child welfare system will take a closer look at this.

ON A RELATED NOTE: My later-in-life Michael Jackson appreciation.

As I’ve mentioned, I started a new job a few months ago as Director of Social Media at a PR firm As I have also mentioned, I am absolutely loving my job. I work with fantastic, smart, nice people, and I get to do interesting work for clients I like and admire.

(Can you tell I like my job?)

Because I have responsibility for a specific, growing area of business for the company - digital media - I feel a lot of ownership of what I am doing in a way that I have not before. Don’t get me wrong - I definitely worked hard and did my best at my other jobs before this one - but no matter how busy I was, I mostly felt “done” at the end of the day, and I could sort of turn work off when I got home, and when you are a parent, that’s important. I think that young children in particular really need to feel like their mother is mentally present when she’s with them, especially if she’s already separated from them all day.

I already have to make an effort to leave home at home when I am at work - that’s always been an issue. I’ve had the great luck to always be employed by relatively family-friendly companies that were understanding of things like the inevitable calls from schools and kids and babysitters that a mother gets on the job, as well as the occasional need to stay home with a sick child, or leave midday for parent teacher conferences. But I’ve tried not to abuse this, so when I am at my desk, in my office, or in a meeting or whatever, I try to be 100% focused on work, and leave home at home. But that’s not always easy for me. It’s taken a certain conscious mental discipline over the years to get to the point where I can really switch gears like that. It also helps when I have childcare that I feel great about set up for all of the kids (which I do these days, but haven’t always in years past.

Now, I find that I am having to try harder to leave my job behind when I am at home.This is because I am so energized by the work I am doing that my mind is always “on” with ideas and possibilities for clients (to whom I try to be responsive 24/7 via my extra appendage BlackBerry). Being this into my work is obviously a good thing in a lot of ways, but I do find myself thinking about things like the language in the social media policy I am writing for a client when I should be thinking about the conversation I am having with one of the kids. If I notice myself doing this, I make an effort to employ my “be here now” mental discipline to put myself back where I actually am, but it’s not easy. And sometimes, I am actually so looking forward to getting started on some work-stuff that I plan to do after they go to bed that I find myself rushing through the evening to get to the point where I can sit back down at my computer. Again, not good. The working after they go to bed is okay - I’ve always done a lot of that - but when they are still awake, I need to be just as focused on mothering as I am on my work when that’s what’s in front of me.

So that’s my challenge at the moment: keep up the momentum and enthusiasm I have for my job while finding a way to be more present in my family life.

Any of you other working mamas have any great tips, tricks or techniques for pulling this off? If so, please share!

This morning when I got to work, I mentioned to my boss (one of them, anyway) that he smelled nice, which he did (very subtle amount of cologne done right, which few men manage to pull off).

He thanked me, and then informed me of the a giant, disgusting wad of dog hair stuck to the front of my dress.

Sometimes I feel like I am really just pretending with this whole dress-like-a-grownup thing. It’s like a costume I have trouble pulling off, rather like if I tried to be a pirate simply by dressing like a pirate. No one would be buying my act.

And sometimes I feel more than a little like Pig-Pen.

I am in awe of the women I know who are both amazingly talented at the work they do, AND manage to look wonderfully put-together and ironed and fresh every day at work (like the woman CEO of my company, whom I idolize just a little because she’s so inspiring and nice and talented). I am not sure how they do it.

But yeah. Dog hair. On my dress. Oh well. It’s not as bad as the day I wore my skirt inside out to a previous job. That was a bad one.

Dear everyone:

Please allow me to take this opportunity to publicly apologize for my support early in the last presidential election cycle for John Edwards. Apparently, he’s an even worse excuse for a husband, father and human being than we realized after the last round of revelations about his cheating and lying.

His behavior is disgusting on so many levels, and from so many angles and points of view that I can’t even find words for it.

If you want to change the world for the better, Mr. Edwards, be the change you want to see. Or as HGTV is fond of suggesting, “start at home.”

Sheesh.

Last night I drove to Nashville to pick up J, after her week-long visit to California. She made the trip at the invitation of my Aunt Judy, my father’s only sibling, with whom I only recently reconnected. There had been some estrangement between my immediate family and my father’s side of the family - all of whom live in California - for the past 10-12 years. It was related to my father’s decision to divorce my mother. The distance meant that my children have grown up completely unfamiliar with their California kin, which made me sad. But we all came back together as a family in the months late last summer just before my father died, as we all tried to figure out how to help him, and during this process, we all realized we had missed too much time with one another. Forgiveness and forgetting were offered from both sides, and now all is well. These days, my Aunt Judy and my mother even chat fairly regularly. Who woulda thunk it? It gives me hope for all kinds of possibilities in relationships and life. It’s wonderful. I only wish it hadn’t taken my father’s rapidly deteriorating mental status last year, followed by his sudden death, to make this happen.

Anyway, a few months ago, my Aunt Judy invited my daughter J to come spend a week in Southern California this summer. J was thrilled at the idea, and I just love this about her; she doesn’t know these people at all, and has no idea what such a visit would entail, but at only 13 years old, she’s adventuresome enough to say heck yeah I want to go to the other side of the country for a week all by myself!

My aunt bought J’s plane ticket, and sent me the details. I was a little nervous about my 13 year old girl flying cross-country alone, since her flight both directions involved a layover of two hours with a plane change - one in Denver and one in Phoenix. But I figured I’d just hook her up with the airline’s “unaccompanied minor” program, and that some airline person would literally walk her through the plane changes. Because I assumed we could do this, I put off checking into it until the day before her flight.

Well, as it turns out, Southwest doesn’t offer this in loco parentis hand-holding service (for which they charge $25 per flight, by the way) for kids over age 11, and they don’t offer it on any flights with layovers or plane changes. The first part of this policy I can understand, but the second part makes ZERO sense to me. I mean, those are the situations where kids actually NEED an airline employee to help them; if it’s a direct flight, it’s not as big a deal for a child to fly alone.

But anyway, it was what it was. J is 13, not younger than 11, and her flights involved changing planes. No unaccompanied minor status was forthcoming. So I explained to J that she would have to handle this all by herself, and she said fine, no problem. J is lucky enough to have done a lot of traveling by plane already (often because her grandparents take her wonderful places, like France), so she didn’t seem too intimidated by getting herself to California without any assistance. I, however, was a little freaked out last Saturday as I watched my little girl confidently navigate her way through airport security, solo, and then turn and wave goodbye to me as she headed away through a crowd of people in the terminal to find her flight and take off.

She texted me when she found her gate, and then again when she located her gate in Denver for the flight change, and then she let me know when she touched down in California. And unlike in days of pre-9-11 yore, no adult was able to be there to greet her as she disembarked from the plane. They had to meet up with her at baggage check, so she had to find that part of the airport by herself, too, and then she had to locate and introduce herself to these relatives she didn’t know. She handled all of it with total aplomb, both coming and going. She is social competence personified. She was born with this amazing emotional intelligence that serves her really well.

Once she arrived in California, my aunt and cousins showed her an AWESOME time. One of my aunt’s granddaughters, M is just a few months older than J. These two second cousins who had never met immediately bonded and ended up spending every minute together for the whole trip. They went to Malibu, rode 4-wheelers on my aunt’s ranch, went to Hollywood, hit the mall several times, and jumped on the trampoline. J also got to go trail riding with Aunt Judy, who is a very accomplished endurance trail competitor. J had an awesome time. I was thrilled that she got to spend a little time with her great-grandmother, my father’s mother, for whom J is named. My great grandmother is in frail health and lives with my Aunt Judy, but J said she seemed really happy to have one of her Tennessee great-grandchildren visiting.

I had told J to be sure to save at least $25 of her spending money for her return trip so she would have funds for food, etc during her full day of air travel. She did, but then when she got to the airport, Southwest charged her $25 to check her small suitcase, which they had checked thru for free on her trip out there. J didn’t want to trouble her Aunt Judy by telling her that this was her last $25, so she paid the airline, and then spent the next 8 hours of cross country travel with NO money for food or drinks. All she ate all day were the free pretzels she got on the plane, plus some water. When she and I texted back and forth during her layover and flight change in Phoenix, I asked her if she had eaten, and she said “yes,” because technically she had (pretzels), but she didn’t tell me the truth - that she had no money or food - until she landed in Nashville because she didn’t want me to worry about her. I would have worried, a lot, so that was sweet of her. Needless to say, she was ravenous when she got to Nashville, so I immediately got her fed before we headed back to east Tennessee.

Oh, and on her flight from Phoenix to Nashville yesterday, J chatted with the woman next to her, and the woman began asking questions about J and her siblings. J, trying to be polite, answered all the questions, but she realized after a bit that the woman thought that J was some poor little urchin with cruel, uninvolved, divorced parents (J said the woman almost whispered the word “divorce” when she asked about her parents) who had callously and casually shipped her off to California with no adult accompaniment. J said the woman seemed to feel very sorry for J’s sad, sad circumstances. I told J she should have explained to the woman that her (J’s) parents would still be married, “except my mom wouldn’t stop with all the Satanic rituals, and after a while my father had just had enough of the headless chickens and skulls full of blood around the house.” I told her that this line probably would have ended the woman’s nosy and condescending inquiry. J says she’ll try it next time some stranger expresses misplaced pity over her terrible and pathetic broken family situation. I suspect she really will, too I hope so.

So that was J’s California adventure. She’s already spent a week in NYC this summer with her church youth group, so she’s had a pretty amazing vacation so far. The next two months are unlikely to measure up. But she and her new best friend/cousin M are already making plans for M to come here next, and J can’t wait to visit SoCal again.

Here are a few photos of J and her cousin M from the trip.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Today I shall adopt the Bob the Builder motivational ethic as I attempt to juggle the tasks of mothering the two-out-of-four children currently at home, whilst simultaneously completing Monday-deadline essay (on cultural Jon & Kate shadenfreude) for a magazine, as well as completing two projects for work.

All together now!: “Can She Do It?!! YES SHE CAN!”

Newsweek has a story online today explaining how the economic downturn means fewer parents can afford summer camps. The story takes the position that this is a good thing, as it allows children more “free play” during the summer months.

Clueless, clueless, clueless.

Except for within a certain highly rarified economic strata, “summer camp” is just a more attractive way of saying “program for working mothers scrambling to patch together some sort of summertime childcare for their elementary-school-aged kids.”

And if parents can’t afford summer camps, they will be looking for some other kind of cheaper childcare. The inability to pay for childcare doesn’t mean children will have some sort of more idyllic summertime experience; it means that kids will be more likely to sit on a couch watching movies all afternoon at the home of the stay-at-home neighbor that their working mom is paying (less than camp fees) to babysit while she’s at her job.

The gazillions of specialty themed summer camps that now exist in every locale in the country serve an important purpose in the messy, American childcare ecosystem, but they aren’t really “camps” in the sense that one thinks of the iconic month canoeing on a lake in Maine with preppy cabin-mates from all over the country.

The summer programs in which many of us enroll our children aren’t really “camp,” any more than the “schools” that exist for children three and under are really schools. In both cases, they are childcare, plain and simple. And we need more good, affordable childcare options in this country, no matter what we choose to call it.

Parents being unable to afford childcare is not a good thing, no matter how Newsweek tries to spin it.