Just in time to commemorate the first anniversary of the Obama victory comes Mrs. O: The Face of Fashion Democracy, a commemorative scrapbook by Mary Tomer, founder of the popular blog mrs-o.org.

Before I cracked open the book—a heavy white rectangle emblazoned with an illustration of a smiling Mrs. Obama dressed in one of her best colors, Tyrian purple—I hesitated. I get worked up about the Mrs. O. fashion discourse. I don’t mean to pull up a college seminar table here, but you have to confess that the general refusal to criticize her outfits, or anything about her style or physique or bearing, is mystifying. Some of her outfits are terrible.

I held the book up and decided as an ideological preview to flip to the election night Hell Dress. This is a neat diagnostic trick. Does Tomer grapple with the ungainly sheath? On the contrary. She writes:

The world didn’t realize it then, but Mrs. Obama had made a major statement about her future fashion choices: she was ready to take chances with fashion-forward designers; she was ready to mix up her style; and she was dressing, ultimately, to please herself. In that regard, the evening was not just a victory celebration, but a declaration of fashion independence.

Mrs. O: The Face of Fashion Democracy is 130-page fashion hagiography.

But there is something in Tomer’s editorial approach that reveals why this must be the case. As she traces the ascent of Michelle Robinson from Chicago’s South Side to FLOTUS, the political milestones and accompanying dresses are peppered with Q&As with designers and jewelers. These interviews are miniature success stories on their own. Many of them are immigrants or non-WASPs, self-starters who made it in highly competitive fashion worlds. The stories of hardship, dedication, success sing in a potent chorus as we progress from the first event of the primary campaign (orange Maria Pinto dress) to the book’s closing on the April 5, 2009 visit to Prague, the final day of the Obama’s European visit (black Michael Kors pencil skirt paired with a Moschino big bow blouse and an Alaïa belt). Our fierce admiration of Mrs. O.—and our reluctance to openly criticize her frocks, even when they merit it—matches the extent of our desire to believe in the American Dream at a time when it is harder and harder to do so.

Tags: mary tomer, Michelle Obama, mrs-o.org

Last month, there was a lively back-and-forth over why exactly we women are so darn unhappy (or so says the research) and what role children play in the mix. Sharon Lerner argued that part of women’s depression can be blamed on the way our society treats mothers, singling out America as a “glaring exception in the developed world and beyond in having no mandatory paid maternity leave, no nationwide childcare system,- [and] few flexible work options.” But Kerry Howley shot back that we can’t make it all about the burdens of motherhood, since not all women are mothers, and emphasized a study that found that children make no difference at all—that both women without children and mothers are similarly happy or unhappy.

Well, fire up your engines, ladies, because now there’s a new bit of research supporting a third conclusion: that being married with children is the key to happiness. In contrast to previous research that indicates an inverse relationship between satisfaction and number of children, this particular study, which tracked 10,000 British households over 15 years, found that the more kids you have, the happier you are. I think that would come as news to those parents who’ve decided to raise a singleton because they also want to have a life of their own.

It’s hard to believe that it doesn’t get exponentially more difficult to maintain a social life with your spouse or carve out “me time” with each additional pregnancy. Recently, one of my closest friends sent me an e-mail kvetching about a typical week taking care of her three kids, which will sound familiar to any of us with multiple young ones underfoot:

Drive 12 carpools.

Pack eight lunches (lucky her, I thought; at our house, we pack 13).

Nurse the baby seven to eight times a day, seven days a week.

Change a million diapers.

Cook a healthy dinner five times a week, and mac and cheese once or twice (while holding a baby in one arm and putting on hair bows and Superman capes with the other).

Even more recently, this same friend complained that she had no energy to lust after her husband. How could she? But an even better question is this: How could having more kids improve the situation?

There’s got to be some Malcolm Gladwellesque tipping point, some reasonable maximum number of kids—maybe four, I’m guessing as a mother of three, and that’s pushing it—at which the happiness stops and the stress takes over. Unfortunately, the study, published in the Journal of Happiness Studies, doesn’t shed much light on that; it lumps together anyone with four or more kids, since there were relatively few families in that multi-offspring group.

It turns out that I should be downright beatific as mom to my trio: Although folks with four or more kids have what the happiness researcher, Luis Angeles from the University of Glasgow, called “an important positive happiness effect” in an e-mail to me, the largest “happiness effect” is attributed to people with three children.

Angeles discounts research that has found child-rearing is lots of work and little reward. Unlike previous studies, he has factored in the role of individual characteristics—including marital status, gender, age, income and education—and found that most parents rate kids as the most important or nearly the most important things in their lives. Those who view children negatively are people who are separated, living together but unmarried, or veteran singles who never married.

So, in essence, his research isn’t an ode to kids as much as a shout-out to marriage. Raise a crop of kids alone and they can feel like a burden; do it in tandem and it’s a shared legacy.

Tags: parenting, Science, women's happiness

I admit it—I wanted my kids to watch Sesame Street because I knew it was at worst harmless, and at best educational—although I've never believed watching TV could make kids smarter, I'm willing to accept that it can teach them to recognize a rectangle. But from the first, it held little interest for them. My oldest preferred Baby Einstein, although with proper maneuvering, I could get in a shower during "Elmo's World"—although not necessarily without tears. He moved on to Blue's Clues, while his younger sisters both preferred Dora and his little brother remains a fan of Little Einsteins. I kept trying, but if Sesame Street was playing, they gradually drifted away. (Not that that's a bad thing, but presumably some children actually watch the show.)

Besides Sesame Street, none would sit still for the various educational interludes networks like PBS and Discovery Kids used to start off their programming—treacly adults, singing children. They didn't want humans on their small screen, doing all of the boring things humans do—they wanted cartoons, often devoid of any background, facial expression or ability to speak (Joe and Steve were the exceptions who proved the rule). Sesame Street had too many grown-ups, too many scene changes, too many intervening videos of kids getting dressed or going about their day—or at least, that's what I thought. Some at Sesame Street seem to have felt the same way—they recently added more regular Muppet segments and "smoother transitions," but it still never took in our house.

So I'll watch Michelle Obama on Sesame Street via YouTube, and if the TV's on today, someone will surely choose one of the usual cartoons on the roster. Sesame Street will just have to turn 40 without us. Will you be watching—or do your kids, like mine, clamor for livelier fare?

Tags: sesame street