Election Day

How we spent our Election Day: Alexis had the day off from school, and (since my mother can't drive due to a broken ankle) since we had access to a car, I took the girls out to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. We first stopped at the Prospect Park Zoo for some good animal observing. The trees seem to be peaking in their color changing and it was a gorgeous day to be outside.


Right next to the zoo sits an old Dutch house, Lefferts Historic House. We've never been there before so we were excited to see what it had to offer.

Since it was Election Day, they were holding a special election for kids. First they had to register, so this woman explained the procedure: write down your name, the street you live on, and your age.

Lexi filled out her voter registration all by herself:

Then she was given a ballot and went behind a curtain/partition where there was a little podium she could use to make her selection for President:

She made her selection without any outside influences:

The final step was placing it in the ballot box :

She also participated in a craft- making election signs! Can you tell that her sign says "Vote for Mommy"? Too bad I really don't want to be president of the U.S. of A.

Even on a typical day, the Lefferts house is a great place to visit. It's basically a historical house museum for kids. They have lots of period toys and activities like pumping water from a barrel (with a real pump that you have to prime), walking on stilts, running with hoops, potato sack races and the like. Here Ella is testing out a bed with a straw mattress. By this point she was so tired I think she would have slept there if I had let her.

The Plank Road was one of the girls' favorite exhibits at the house. It was built here to recall a wooden plank road built in 1855 on the Flatbush-Fulton Road (now part of Flatbush Ave). John Lefferts (whose home is now the museum) was one of the investors in the company that built the plank road and charged tolls to use it. This was one of the many plank roads built throughout the nation around that time offering farmers in villages like Flatbush a faster, mud- and rut-free way to take produce to market.

This is what the tolls along the plank road looked like.

Later in the evening, Matt and I voted at a local elementary school and then headed over to Ben and Jerry's for their free scoop of ice cream promotion. It was a long line, out the door around the corner and down almost half a long-block, but we only ended up waiting for 6 minutes.

I ended the day visiting my friend Mackenzie who gave birth to baby Sam on Election Day morning- a momentous day to be born! Congratulations, Doug & Mackenzie!