WASHINGTON — Two-month-old Alec Neel Vance already has his own Secret Service detail. His mother finds the whole arrangement a little funny.
“It’s sort of an absurdity because he’s always attached to me,” Second Lady Usha Vance told The Daily Wire’s Mary Margaret Olohan in an interview at her office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. “He’s never anywhere far from me.”
None of the couple’s three older children had that distinction as newborns, she noted. Then again, none of them arrived while their father was a heartbeat away from the presidency.
A first in 150 years
According to the Daily Wire, Alec is the first child born to a sitting vice president in roughly 150 years, and the family’s every outing — from Marine Two to Air Force Two, from Oval Office visits to school drop-offs — has drawn the kind of public fascination not seen since the Kennedys occupied the White House.
The Second Lady greeted the interviewer while “baby-wearing” Alec in a carrier strapped to her chest, dressed in a white button-down, skirt, and heels, and remained standing through the conversation so she could pace the room and keep the newborn content. She joked that the audio recording would likely pick up the sound of her patting his back when he got fussy.
“Newborns all have their moments of being a little bit more challenging, but we’re feeling very lucky,” she said, glancing down at him. As a fourth baby, she added, Alec seems to have absorbed the rhythms of a busy household — though she allowed that “there’s plenty of time for him to get really tough.”
An unexpected promotion for the youngest
Before Alec arrived, Usha Vance said she worried how four-year-old Mirabel would handle losing her status as the family’s baby.
Those concerns evaporated quickly. “She seems to think that she has gotten a promotion, so she’s really into it,” the Second Lady said.
Nine-year-old Ewan, meanwhile, has become his little brother’s most devoted fan. He begs to carry Alec in the baby carrier, tries to hold him constantly, and has taken up burping duties.
“He is absolutely enamored of his brother,” Usha Vance said. Six-year-old Vivek rounds out the sibling lineup.
Viral footage has repeatedly shown the Vance children clutching stuffed animals on tarmacs, yawning through official events, and peering over their father’s shoulder at moments of state — a family that the public seems to have adopted in real time.
Diapers, bagel shops, and the floor of JD’s office
The Second Lady has made a habit of resuming public life almost immediately after giving birth — a resolve that has meant nursing babies on park benches and changing diapers in what she described as “all sorts of odd situations.”
Asked about the strangest place she had recently changed Alec, she recalled restaurant bathroom floors that lacked changing tables, then glanced at the desk in front of her.
“This desk here,” she said. “I think the floor of JD’s office once!”
The scrutiny is different this time around, she acknowledged. “It’s different to wonder whether people are watching when you’re struggling with some of the things that any parent of any newborn struggles with.”
In practice, though, the reactions have been warm. Most people don’t expect to encounter the Second Lady in a bagel shop, coffee shop, or library, she said, and those who do notice have only offered congratulations or kind words about the baby.
Protecting breakfast with Dad
Keeping family life functional inside the vice presidential bubble, Usha Vance said, depends heavily on staff who go out of their way to shield the Vice President’s time as a father.
“So many people who work in this office have been incredibly dedicated to making sure that [JD’s] time as a father is protected,” she said, describing a workplace culture where the Vice President has made clear his family comes first and the people around him respond in kind.
The result, she said, is a father of four who is just as hands-on as he was with the first three — with “a little army behind him” making it possible. On the morning of the interview, JD Vance handled all the school drop-offs and took the kids out to feed the family’s chickens while his wife attended her first meetings away from the baby.
“There have been several mornings when I haven’t seen our older children before they go to school because he’s handled all of that,” she said.
The chicken coop, built to match the residence’s architecture and without taxpayer dollars, is part of the family’s chore chart — though the hens have yet to produce eggs, leaving the children “consistently disappointed.”
Chores, Catholic school, and a marriage of ‘constant conversation’
The Vances have deliberately chosen schools and routines meant to keep their children grounded. Usha Vance said it mattered to both parents that the kids not be “cloistered away from the world,” and that their classmates’ families reflect the broader community rather than the political one.
Teachers, she said, do not treat the Vance children as special — something she called a relief. Their closest friends come from all walks of life, “none of them are from political families or particularly wealthy,” and discipline at school works the same as it does for anyone else.
“They get really filthy at school on the playground … if they get in trouble, they get in trouble like any other kid.”
The couple chose Catholic school in part because they wanted an environment that would treat their children as “whole people.” It also reflects an arrangement the Vice President committed to during their courtship: raising his children Catholic, even though his wife is Hindu.
Usha Vance described that interfaith marriage as a “constant conversation.” She said she felt no pressure from the Catholic Church’s expectations around mixed marriages, and no pressure from her husband to adopt his beliefs — nor does she push him to change his.
Instead, she said, his faith has given the couple something new to explore together. A convert himself, JD Vance saw their children’s religious formation as a chance to keep learning.
“He thought the Catholic school might be one of the ways to bring this into family life and to learn about it together,” she said.
Two different childhoods, one partnership
The Second Lady grew up comfortably in suburban San Diego, a world apart from the Appalachian upbringing her husband chronicled in “Hillbilly Elegy.” She told the Daily Wire that his radically different life was part of what drew her to him at Yale Law School — along with his kindness, his gentleness, and how much fun he was to be around.
She had less to say about the summer reading challenge she was there to promote, other than to note its results: 30,000 children signed up, double the turnout of last year’s pilot program. It was, in its way, the same message she returned to throughout the conversation — that the work of raising children, in a bagel shop or an executive office building, is mostly made of ordinary moments.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/keeping-up-with-usha-vance