How mom grilled Obama

In advance of Barack Obama's visit to North Carolina this week, we asked readers if they would send us questions that they'd want us to ask him. This is part of our citizen journalism initiative, including our recent citizenQ packages on the Q front when, once a month, we turn the section over to essays written by members of the public.

One of our respondents was Jane Olsen, a 30-year-old resident of Washington, in Eastern North Carolina, who wanted to hear Obama's views on the Bear Stearns bailout.

Rob Christensen, our veteran political reporter, was good enough to ask her question and questions from two other folks -- Barry Freeman of Chapel Hill and Joel Glassman of Cary -- when he had some time with the senator Wednesday.

I wanted to know more about Olsen. We had her e-mail address. She sent in a photo for us to use as a mug shot; but actually, what we used on the front page of Thursday's N&O was a cropped version of what she sent us. The photo included one of her sons, Oliver, when he was 4 months old.

So I contacted her, and this is what she told me:

Life for Olsen used to be working in emergency services, as a firefighter/EMT and as an ambulance dispatcher. Life right now is pretty much taking care of her toddlers, Emmett and Ollie.

She has lived in the Washington-Greenville area for about 18 years. She and her husband, Andy, have been married for more than five years and decided to settle in Washington to be close to family.

"Other than following news about the upcoming election and trying to keep up with meals, laundry and diapers, my passion is the Carolina Hurricanes," she said.

She's not kidding. She and her husband come to Raleigh for games and watch faithfully on TV. And one of her two blogs is called Penalties and Parenthood, and can be seen at www.janeybell.net. In her Thursday post on the Canes' Atlanta win, she had some pointed remarks about her team's inconsistent defensive play.

Her other blog, The Toddler Reality Show, is found at www.estuarium.com/greenville-nc. It is highly amusing.

Wednesday, Obama was stumping in Fayetteville and Charlotte. Olsen started her day in the backyard with her sons in their historic waterfront town.

She then went to the grocery store to get trash bags, and then the boys had lunch with dad. When he left to return to work, mom and kids went to a park. Then they stopped by her mother's house so the boys could visit with Nana and Olsen's 91-year-old grandmother. Then she took Emmett and Ollie home, cooked dinner, got the boys a bath and prepared them for bed.

Thursday, she was online, where she reads The N&O. A friend who had the print edition called, saying something like: Hey, do you know your face is on the front of the Raleigh paper?

"Quite a shock," recalled Olsen, who ran out to buy a copy.

"It's so strange," she wrote me, "to try to parallel my day with Obama's whirlwind travel schedule, speeches, and the countless people he talked to on Wednesday."

"For one little block of all the time he allotted to so many souls, my little question got to be center stage. It really personifies what started out as some words on the screen of my Mac. Being able to have a question that was so fresh on my mind answered so quickly brought me a lot closer to the campaign trail than I would usually have access to, living in Eastern North Carolina.

"It felt almost humbling to think that while I was fixing lunch for my boys and then sitting at the park watching them play, someone was carrying my question to Fayetteville to be addressed by a presidential candidate. It was definitely the closest I've felt to the political process in quite a while."