Posted by Mark Silva at 3:50 pm CDT
BUDAPEST — This European shuttle diplomacy, with President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush flying from Vienna to Budapest this evening, takes a toll on the White House’s standard bedtime.
The first lady, suggesting that the first couple lives “above the shop,” noted today that the president’s morning commute enables them to rise at 5:30 am Eastern time each morning and still enable Bush to get to the Oval Office by 7 am Eastern. This also requires an early bedtime, Laura Bush explained to students in a roundtable discussion at the Austrian National Library today, before the first couple departed for Budapest, where they are spending the night before returning to Washington late Thursday evening — in time, perhaps, for a slightly delayed bedtime at the White House. All this came up when a student in Vienna asked the first lady about life at the White House.
“Okay, a day at — a typical day at the White House,” Laura Bush said.
“Well, I’ll give you a workday first. We get up about 5:30 a.m. The president gets up and goes in and gets the coffee and brings it back to me in bed… Very nice of him.”
“Record that, please,” the president added.
“Then,” said the first lady, “we have three animals that get up at the same time and they have to go out — two dogs and a cat. The cat actually doesn’t have to go out, but the two dogs do.
“So then we read the newspapers and drink coffee until we finally get up,” she said. “We eat breakfast about 6:30 a.m (EDT). The president goes to work at the West Wing, which is right there — we live where we work. It’s sort of like living above the shop — and goes to the West Wing to work at 7 am.
“Usually, I don’t go to work until later, around 9 a.m., unless I’m traveling in the U.S,” she explained. “The president’s offices are in the West Wing of the White House. My offices are in the East Wing.. There are about 18 people on my staff, and we — I have a lot of initiatives that we’re working on.”
“And then, usually about 5:30 p.m. or 6 p.m., we’re back in the residence of the White House,” she said. ” We have dinner.
“A lot of times our girls come over to have dinner with us,” the first mom explained of the first twins.
“One of them was just living with us, but she just has moved out. The other one lives in an apartment and is teaching school. She’s a Third Grade schoolteacher. So sometimes they’ll come over and have dinner with us. Sometimes we’ll watch a movie in the White House theater. But we do go to bed early. And so that’s sort of the typical day.”
These two days in Vienna and Budapest have upset the typical day, but we’re here to tell you that the Bushes got into Budapest tonight in a time frame that approximates that East Coast schedule. And they will be up early, with a day of festivities culminating in a speech that Bush will deliver to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian revolution.
Then it’s home to Washington.
And bed. And newspapers and coffee in bed Friday morning. “Above the shop.”
(Photo: First lady Laura Bush answers a question from a student regarding what a day at the White House is like as President Bush looks on during a roundtable discussion at the Austrian National Library in Vienna, Austria, Wednesday, June 21, 2006. AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
