USA Weekend Magazine Visits the Palin Family

*
USA Weekend Magazine recent spent an afternoon with multitasking mom Sarah Palin and her family. Here are a few excerpts from the story, which will appear in more than 700 newspapers across the country Sunday:

The house is a surprisingly simple A-frame that husband Todd, 45, built in 2002. About the only wall decorations — other than a magnificent view of the lake through floor-to-ceiling windows — are deer and caribou heads and a rack of moose antlers mounted above the flat-screen TV in the all-purpose living-dining-family room. So far, the one visible sign of Palin’s burgeoning income... is a two-story office under construction with an adjoining hangar for Todd’s small plane. A driveway strewn with eight pickups and cars makes the small compound’s entrance resemble an auto-repair lot more than the home of a political superstar.

For Palin, the juggling act is evidence of presidential bona fides. “I think this country would be served very well by a woman president, someone who has raised a family,” she says, stopping short of saying she wants to run in 2012. “We just want to get from point A to point B and get the job done. I don’t waste time; I’m too busy.”

[...]

As she promotes a growing Palin empire, her family is held together by trim, blue-eyed Todd, a man’s man who can cradle a baby bottle as well as a hunting rifle (yes, he shot both that deer and that moose hanging on the wall).

Having him man the home front “is the biggest change” of Palin’s new life as full-time “celebutician,” as she’s been dubbed. For years, she says, she was a single mom every other week while Todd worked 850 miles away in Alaska’s oil fields. “Practically speaking, it’s easier now that he is home.”

Still, “he works harder than any guy that any of us will ever know,” Palin says, shooting a smile at him a few feet away. “He gets up at 4:30, changes Trig, feeds him in the high chair,” then drives Willow to high school 14 miles away, only to come home and ferry Piper to grade school. “Todd doesn’t sleep much!” Palin says, interrupting herself and offering to make a bottle to help Bristol, a visibly exhausted and exasperated young mom. Palin opens a bottle of formula and continues to talk, while Bristol stands at the kitchen sink with Tripp, eating a taco her mom made.

Only two weeks earlier, Bristol moved into her first-ever apartment in Anchorage, 45 miles away, where she works as an assistant in a dermatologist’s office. There, she is learning to cope as a single working teenage mother.

Read the full feature story here.

- JP