Mrs. Obama dissolved into giggles, and the two traded title ideas, one sillier than the next, all of them too ridiculous to repeat to a newspaper reporter, Ms. Williams said.

One day after the presidential election, the Obama family of Chicago’s Hyde Park is only beginning to figure out how to become the first family of the United States.

As the first African-Americans in the role, they will be a living tableau of racial progress, and friends say they are acutely aware that everything they say and do — the way they dress, where Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7 , go to school, even what kind of puppy they adopt — will brim with symbolic value.

“Here’s an intact black family, a happy family, with beautiful kids and a loving extended family,” Ms. Williams said, “and they happen to live in the executive mansion.”

For President-elect Barack Obama and his family, leaving Chicago means dismantling the protective cocoon they have built around them.

Throughout the campaign, Malia and Sasha, who will become the youngest White House occupants in decades, spent many hours in their grandmother’s tiny South Side apartment, in the same building where their mother was raised. Their private school at the University of Chicago is laced with neighbors and allies who watch over the girls with loving vigilance.

When the girls and their mother have needed an escape, they could retreat to the backyards of longtime friends, where they jumped rope or turned up the volume on their iPods and danced with abandon to songs by Soulja Boy and Beyoncé Knowles. Mrs. Obama, a creature of the South Side and of habit, has spent nearly every Saturday for the past 10 years with the same two friends and their collective brood of children, lately at a local California Pizza Kitchen where the group hashes over their weeks together.

Now all of that must change.

On Wednesday afternoon, Mrs. Obama spoke with the first lady, Laura Bush, who invited her and her daughters to visit the White House soon. The hunt for a new school begins now, Mrs. Obama told friends. In Hyde Park, she has a reputation as a fiercely attentive mother, one who watches Malia’s footwork closely at soccer games while other parents drift and gossip over lattes. Friends say Mrs. Obama will apply the same scrutiny to her daughters’ transition to Washington.

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