This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Hey, guys, we are back on Normally.

The Show with Normalish Takes for When the News Gets Weird.

I am Mary Catherine Hamm and Carol is out, but we are happy, so happy and lucky to be joined today by the president

and founder of defending education and one of my longtime buddies, Nikki Neely. How's it going, Nikki?

Everything is great. Thanks for having me. Very, very good. You know, you and I both, I'm on the road,

you're at home. We're both summering it up here while Carol's on vacation.

And as you were while we were prepping,

prepping your kids lunch and getting everything in order,

it made me think of there was a brief controversy yesterday online on X when someone flagged that a New York Times writer

who was profiling Emma Waters was very confused about how Emma Waters, who is like a, you know, pro-family, pro-kids, you know, pro-natal person and policy person, was just constantly on the go and parenting her children when this person was trying to fact-check

her. And she thought that that was confusing and maybe hypocritical given that she

pushes for more children.

The audacity of trying to maintain a work-life balance and still parent. No, it was wild. I was like, have you ever met one of us before? Yeah. This is what we do. No, this is like I have had friends who have tried to talk me to having like an executive assistant. I'm like, I don't think you understand the amount of things I'm juggling. Like I don't want anybody to get into the amount of time it's going to take to get from the ortho to school, to lunch, to that, like, this is a me problem. I'm just doing it. Call me on my cell phone. I'm going to be dropping my kid at the next appointment or and or camp, and then we'll discuss. Anyway, I just thought that was funny as we were gathering our stuff and our brains to get

ready for this podcast.

All right.

So I do want to talk about there is another gathering going on.

The American Federation of Teachers, which I just read has reelected none other than Randy

Weingarten for another two years as head of that organization

because nothing succeeds like success, Nikki.

And I guess she has succeeded at some things,

...