Washington DC, Day 2...Part 2

After touring Ford's Theatre and the Petersen House (and eating ice cream from the vendor who was conveniently located at the exit of the Petersen House), we took the Metro to Arlington National Cemetery. The kids were much more impressed than I thought they'd be. You know your kid is at least starting to get it when he reads a memorial, puts his arms around your waist, and says "That makes me feel kind of sad, Mom." Each of those thousands of tombstones represent a person - someone's son or daughter, mother or father, brother or sister - a person with a story, whose sacrifice ultimately helped shape the country we know now.




















The kids were especially impressed with the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns. Really, who wouldn't be?!









































































In the evening we met my best friend from college and her husband and daughter for dinner. It's been at least 15 years since we've seen each other. It was so nice to see her again. The kids had fun goofing off together, too.
















Day 3 - the Washington Monument, a walk-by of the White House, a couple Smithsonian Museums, and the Jefferson & Roosevelt Memorials.

Washington DC, Day 2...Part 1

Here are a couple pictures leftover from yesterday. Again, they aren't as in focus as they could/should be because I forgot my tripod at home. :(

Tyler took this picture at lunch today. I thought it was funny.

Today we visited Ford's Theatre and Petersen House. As everyone knows, Ford's Theatre is where John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln. We successfully bored the children to death in the museum and then walked through the theatre and looked at the presidential box where he, his wife, and 2 guests sat. Once again, Tyler found all this much more interesting than Danielle did. Tyler has surprised us several times on this trip by how much he knows, especially considering they really haven't covered much in school yet. I have to admit that I found this all much more interesting than I remembered it being the first time I visited (in the 8th grade!). I'm sure the kids will feel the same way some day.

Can you imagine our present day presidents "Keeping Shop"??

After we toured the theatre, we walked across the street and did a quick walk through of the Petersen House. This is the house where Lincoln was taken to receive medical assistance after he was shot. He was shot at 10:15 pm on April 14, 1865 and died shortly after 7am the following morning.

Will post about the rest of the day tomorrow. I'm nodding off again...

Washington DC, Day 1

Today was a very full day. We started off with a guided tour at the National Archives. Danielle was complaining she was bored 2 minutes into the docent's talk, but Tyler thought it was interesting. Within the Archives, the Charters of Freedom houses the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. The ink is now so faint that you can hardly read the documents anymore, yet it's still moving to look at such important pieces of history.

After our tour, we stopped for lunch on our way to the Bureau of Engraving & Printing. We ate outside, and this squirrel wanted our food. We saw this other squirrel trying to stay cool. It was quite warm today!

Both kids are equipped with cameras on this vacation, so we had to make lots of stops for photo ops. Their pictures are funny. After vacation I'll try to get each of them to post a couple of their favorites.

Once we made it to the BEP, we waited in line for a tour to see how & where they print our money (the notes, not the currency). It was a rather long wait, but the tour was very interesting. The kids really enjoyed watching all those hundreds get printed, cut, & stacked into bricks. On one little tiny pallet of finished bills, we did the math and counted $2,560,000. Wow! Of course, they are quick to point out that none of it is actually worth anything yet because the Federal Reserve hasn't monetized it yet. I think we could make it through quite a bit of that pile before anyone realized it wasn't monetized!


After our tour, we grabbed a taxi and headed to the Capitol. Since we cheated and took a taxi, we got there a little early and had time to explore the Thomas Jefferson building of the Library of Congress. What a gorgeous building! We looked at Jefferson's library, too. Although you can't actually touch any of the books, they have digital copies you can read. Tyler thought it was fun to browse those. The next time we visit DC, I think it would be worth it to take a LOC tour. We just don't have time on this trip.

We made it to the US Capitol ahead of schedule and got put in with an earlier tour group, which I thought was very convenient. This was the only tour I was disappointed with. (BTW, you can only tour the Capitol now by submitting a request to your state representative.) There was so much to see, yet the tour guide rushed us through. All of the tour guides seemed to be doing that. I felt like we really didn't have enough time to explore or take pictures. It is such a beautiful building, though. They now show a movie at the beginning of the tour. It talks about how & why congress was formed. It was very interesting. Ron and I think our current Congressmen should all be made to watch it, lest they lose sight of their true purpose and function (which so many of them have). The kids thought the movie was super boring, but they liked the rest of the tour. (Tyler more so than Danielle.) We all had to wear headphones so we could hear the tour guide. The kids liked that novelty. The statue is a plaster mold of Freedom. Her bronze statue is on top of the Capitol's dome. And speaking of "on top of the dome" - as you can see in one of my pictures, there was a guy out there working today. That is one job I certainly would not want!

After our tour, we walked across the street to look at the Supreme Court. There is so much symbolism on the building, but I can't remember all of it. At this point we were all near exhaustion, so we really couldn't even muster enough energy to walk up the steps. We had dinner at Tortilla Coast just down the block and then grabbed the Metro back to the hotel.

After some time in the pool, we drove back into DC and visited the Lincoln Memorial. I forgot my tripod, so my pictures aren't nearly as crisp as they could be. The Memorial was impressive though and, as one kid yelled on his way down the steps, "it looks just like the back of a penny!" The view across the mall to the Washington Monument was beautiful, too. I'll try to post a couple of those pictures tomorrow. I'm nodding off now...

Tomorrow we are headed to Ford's Theatre & Petersen House and to Arlington National Cemetery.

This and That

We've been busy trying to get acclimated to school routines and have had little time for much else this past week. Danielle is struggling to get used to all day/every day school plus cheerleading practice 2 nights a week. She is a kid who still needs 11 or 12 hours of sleep to feel fully rested, and she's just not getting it. That makes for a very grumpy...and mouthy...7 year old! Tyler seems to be doing just fine. His biggest complaint is not being allowed to stay up and read in bed. (But I know he still does.)

I am in charge of volunteers for the lunch room this year. Since volunteer forms aren't due back until this Friday, I've been trying to help out a lot. If it wasn't so terribly hot in there, it would be kind of fun. I enjoy seeing Tyler & Danielle, and it's fun to listen to the kids talk. Today someone almost caught the microwave on fire. A girl microwaved her bagel...for 2 minutes. We were just seconds away from flames. It was kind of exciting. :) The other day Tyler's class was done eating lunch and wanted to go outside for recess. Their teacher had stepped out for a minute before dismissing them. One boy was impatient and, wanting me to dismiss them, asked me, "Um, are you allowed to, you know, boss us around and stuff?" I got a kick out of that. Today I overhead a couple 2nd graders talking about how disgusting boogers are but sometimes you just have to get in there and dig them out. I suppose they're right.

Other random things:

We saw the International Space Station when it was visible last Friday. It was very bright and moved very fast. Ron swears he could see the solar arrays with my high-powered binoculars. I read online that that is possible, so we had to believe him. Although the kids only saw a bright light, they thought it was pretty cool. (We showed them online pictures of what it really looks like.)

I managed to finally get a couple pictures of our hummingbirds. One picture is a little blurry, but I thought it was cool because you can see his tongue. (He doesn't have a red throat because he is a juvenile. He has a red dot.) The first 2 pictures are of the male. The last picture is a female.

We have 10 chrysalises on 2 plants. (There are 6 in this picture.) Unfortunately they will probably all eclose while we are out of town this weekend. We moved them all back outside once they made their chrysalises, so they will probably be long gone by the time we get back.

The butterfly is a pearl crescent.

Back to School

Our 11 weeks of summer vacation went quickly. We experienced a lot, we had a lot of fun, and hopefully we made lots of good memories. Here are some pictures from the kids' first day back.

Danielle lost her tooth on Sunday and was very self conscious about her smile at first. I think she looks cute. She thinks it's cool that she can now stick french fries in her mouth without actually opening her mouth. It's the small things, I guess. Her hair looked cute in the back this morning. Guess I should have taken a picture of that, too.

Tyler is a little anxious about this coming year. They've made a big deal out of making it known that 3rd grade is immensely more difficult than anything they've done so far. When you add the extra responsibilities he's going to have with the special program he's in, I think he's feeling a little stressed out. Danielle would be perfectly content with school if she only went 2 or 3 days a week, like last year. Thankfully they won't have a full week of school for another 3 weeks since we're going to Washington DC next week and Labor Day is the following week.

Every year I make a first-day-of-school cake. This year I used Family Fun's plan to make a science flask/beaker. It's supposed to look like a flask with boiling blue liquid in the bottom and bubbles rising to the top, not a polka-dotted volcano. If you think it looks like a volcano, don't tell me. Instead of using FF's idea to use cotton candy as the smoke coming out of the top of the flask, I used a PVC pipe with a sealed cap at one end and dry ice. The cake definitely would not have been the same without the dry ice smoke! Somehow Danielle was out of focus in all my pictures of the 2 of them with the cake. The only problem with this year's cake: I'm not sure how I can top this next year!

Wrapping It Up

We are wrapping up our final week of summer vacation. We finished off the week with a trip to the metropark to catch butterflies & frogs, a trip to the "inflatables place", another trip to the pool, and another trip to the water park. We were too tired to make it to the evening program at the metropark, and it's supposed to rain tomorrow so the balloon festival probably won't happen, but we managed to pack a lot into this week!! I am tired!



Here are a few pictures from this week. I didn't take my camera to the pool on Thursday, and, wouldn't it figure, that's the day Tyler decided to try the high dive. He loved it. I just wish he would have discovered it earlier in the season! My brother went with us to the water park today and took Tyler around to all the water slides.



















































































Now we're looking ahead to school starting. The kids voted to spend their last day at home, so that's what we're doing on Monday. Monday evening the kids get to take their supplies in and meet their teachers, although both kids already know theirs. Afterward, we're looking forward to our annual back-to-school ice cream bash with some of our good neighbor-friends.










This is totally unrelated, but here are a couple more caterpillar pictures. The caterpillars are HUGE! They are now as long as my pinky finger and very fat! The ones we keep inside never get that large. We counted 12 of them the other day. They are so big, I'm sure they will be making their chryalises soon. Hopefully they won't wander too far when they do.






























And...does anyone notice anything wrong with this last picture. It's supposed to be of a hummingbird (not his ghost). You'd think that after 8 months I would have figured out my camera a little better. Oh well. I thought this was kind of funny.