After going back and forth in my mind about whether or not to attempt to attend Barack Obama's inauguration, I had decided to skip it. Then a friend who lives in D.C. urged me to come stay at her house Monday night and make the trip with her and her husband Tuesday morning. At the last minute, I took her up on her offer, bringing my 6-year-old son and leaving my preschool-aged daughter home with my husband.

On the drive down Monday evening, I tried to impress upon my son, Jack, the momentousness of the occasion. I started to explain that not that long ago, black people were not even allowed to eat in the same places as white people. He interrupted me and said, "But Martin Luther King changed the world." I agreed that King and many others had changed the world and that was why we were able to have Obama as our next president and that it was something he'd hopefully remember forever.

On inauguration day, we hopped on a bus and arrived a few blocks north of the Mall around 8 a.m. My friends had tickets to the event, so we split from them and headed to the nearest checkpoint entry. This is where things started to go wrong. Jack and I were squished in the middle of a huge crowd that took up an entire intersection and the surrounding streets for several blocks. All was fine until an ambulance tried to get through, forcing people to smoosh up against others even more. The ambulance stopped in front of us, attempted to back up (almost hitting several people) and then moved forward a few feet and sat idling.

During all this sandwiching of people, Jack got pretty freaked out and said through some tears, "This was not a great idea!" Meanwhile, my cell phone kept getting text messages from The Washington Post about entrance points being jammed. Jack voted for going back to our friends' house and watching on TV. So we pushed our way through the crowds, bought some Obama gear from street vendors, then hopped on an empty bus back up to Mt. Rainier.

We ended up watching the inauguration on a big-screen TV at The Artmosphere Café on Rhode Island Avenue and having a lovely time, clapping, crying and cheering with a small, happy group of Obama fans.

Were I to attempt such a thing again, I would have
a)    arrived earlier
b)    planned to enter the Mall through a less-crowded area farther from the action
c)    considered the ramifications, though it luckily didn't occur in this case, of having a 6-year-old trapped in a sea of thousands of shoulder-to-shoulder crowds who suddenly yelled, "Mom, I have to poop!"

Even though the day didn't go exactly according to plan, I'm still glad we tried and I think that seeing the crowds and feeling people's energy made an impression on Jack (and on me) that couldn't be matched by simply watching it on TV here at home. And despite a few tears, Jack was ultimately glad to be on the scene and was particularly thrilled by his new Obama hat and t-shirt.

I'll wait until he's older to expect any deeper meaning to sink in.