I bounced up and down, grinned like a fiend on speed, and whooped it up and hollered when Michelle Obama waved to me today outside the YMCA. 

My three-year-old son cried. 

"But Mama, I want to give her the pine cone," he said as large tears fell down his cold, red cheeks. He clutched three leaves in his hand - the ones he picked from the soggy garden as special gifts for her. He tried to blink away the tears. 

How do you explain to a toddler that we can't chase after the President's wife? That even if we could, the men and women with wires peeking from behind their ears and from the tops of their coats, wouldn't let us give her "treasures" gathered from the ground? 

I'm convinced my children think the Obamas are family friends they just haven't met yet. They see the photographs of the President and his wife hanging in different rooms. They hear their parents talk about the presidential family with first names:  "Barack" and "Michelle", "Sasha" and "Malia." 

They knew I ran into the President and his daughters outside The Dairy Godmother - the same place they frequent for custard cones. 

The line that separates us from celebrities doesn't exist for them (never mind that it probably shouldn't for us, either)...

Read the rest at Feast After Famine.