An extended First Family in Obama White House

As he adapts to the White House, president Barack Obama is enjoying the company of his extended family, with some 50 friends and in-laws already visiting and more planning "spring sleepovers".
    
"To help him adjust to Washington, president Obama has lifted an entire network of unassuming friends and in-laws from the South Side into the capital's stratosphere," says the Washington Post.
    
A bus filled with about 50 of Obama's friends and in-laws arrived at the White House just after midnight, as Inauguration Day came to a close, for what they called a "housewarming party."
    
The group had celebrated more than a dozen moves together over the years, usually with casual dinners in bungalows on the South Side of Chicago. This time, they wore rented tuxedos and gowns as a small army of presidential staffers  ushered them past Secret Service agents and into the East Room, says the report.
    
The new president called over a photographer and explained that he wanted one final memento from the historic day. He gathered his in-laws -- teachers, secretaries and retirees from a self-described middle-class black family in Chicago -- and posed with them beneath a 1797 portrait of George Washington in his velvet suit.
    
"I was just trying to soak it all in, and then this realisation hit me," said Steve Shields, 57, Michelle Obama's uncle. "It was like, 'Okay. This is different. All of the sudden, we are the family that's, like, at the centre of the universe.'"

But none in the family has been more suddenly transported than Michelle Obama's mother Marian Robinson, 71, who has moved from the walk-up home where she spent 40 years to the historic mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
    
She has a room on the third floor, one level up from the Obamas, with a four-poster bed, a walk-in closet, a television set and a small sitting area for guests. She can walk down the hall to visit Malia and Sasha in their playroom.
    
Robinson sometimes yearns for her anonymous life in Chicago, but she is committed to making the president and first lady feel at home.
    
And she is hardly alone in that commitment. Kaye Wilson, godmother to both Obama daughters, will visit about once a month. More than a dozen other friends and relatives -- some of whom have never so much as visited Washington -- are scheduling spring sleepovers in the White House.
    
Marian's primary daily task is to shepherd her grandchildren to and from school.
    
"I think the hardest thing in her situation is that making new friends is almost impossible," said Wilson, the godmother. "I don't know how anybody makes friends from inside the White House. And when you get to our age, making friends anywhere is hard."
    
So the only option -- for Marian, for the Obamas -- is to bring their old friends to Washington. As Michelle said goodbye to the Chicago entourage at the end of the inauguration weekend, she encouraged a handful of friends and in-laws to immediately buy plane tickets for return trips to Washington.