President Elect Barack Hussein Obama

It's November 5th 2008 9:45am Central European Time, 4 hours and 45 minutes since Barack Obama reached and surpassed that magic number of 279 ( We are 6 hours ahead of the East Coast and 9 hours ahead of the West Coast). I had my laptop next to my bed all night with that infamous election night map on the screen. I would wake occasionally and hit refresh to see how the election was coming. I remember at one point seeing Obama 123 McCain 59 (or something like that). I went back to sleep with a smile on my face. The next thing I knew my phone was ringing at 5am. I knew it was either Michael or Shauna. It was Shauna. "Mom, we won!" I immediately reached for my computer as I tried to actually process the reality of what she was saying. We were on the phone for about 30 minutes sharing the victory as her friends celebrated in the background. The first thing I wanted to do when Shauna called was to literally run in and jump on Nikki with the news but I didn't think Bert would really appreciate that so I restrained myself. An hour later I had a live online broadcast from NBC and they were waiting for Obama to appear onstage at the rally at Grant Park in Chicago. I knew Nik would want to see his speech live, not later today on You Tube, so that's when I tentatively knocked on their bedroom door "Nik?...Nikki?" Poor Bert opened the door and almost disbelievingly I whispered "We won." Nik scrambled out of the bed with a "What?!!" "We won!" I said, " Obama is about to speak." as we both rushed back to the computer. And so we sat there, with our messy hair and pj's, alternately laughing and crying as we watched and listened to history being made.