Escape to D.C.

Ecape to D.C.
I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Washington DC.  I really don't love the town itself.  It reeks of self importance, lobbiests, and all things I loth about politics.  But the flip side to that is it also it is the capitol of our great nation.  The Washington monument welcomes you from miles away. It's flanked on one side by the emence and awesome Lincoln memorial and the Capitol building on the other.
I think it's also safe to say that in the 8+ time I've been to DC over the last 25 years I have never been there when the weather was good...ever.  It's been 105 and humid as all get up and it's been 33 with a wind chill factor in the single digits.  Just once it would be nice to go there and have the temperature be somewhere in the middle.
But we are blessed to live a long couple hours away(traffic is hit or miss, normally miss) and we have taken every opportunity we've had to go and partake of it's great wealth of museums, monuments, and history.  So last weekend with the stars and the schedules aligned we went up again.  This time we decided to try another hotel that was a little more out of DC.  Actually as long as the hotel had a pool no one cared where it was.
We ventured out at 5:00 on Friday, we were supposed to leave "early" by Todds predictions but to be honest it occured to me in all our years never once when Todd thought we'd leave early did that actually happen.  So I will just be grateful  we left as "early" as we did.  Traffic was no so bad and we checked into the hotel with plenty of time to swim, eat pizza, exercise in the gym, and watch TV.  The next morning we decided as it would be the better of the 2 weather days to go to the Mall, not the shopping kind, and go to the Native American Museum.  It's like a block from the capitol and only a couple years old in a very unique and artistic building that pays homage to the southwest.  The building is fantastic, it reminds me of the gugeheim in New York with it's circular interior and vast open spaces. They have huge prisms that scatter rainbows throughout the interior.  They have a wonderful kids section with tons of hands on things for the kids to see and do.  The kids played for a while and then we ventured into the exhibits.  I have to say that I was a little unimpressed with the exhibits themselves. They seemed to focus a lot on the present day indians and their tribes.  There was very little on their history, and they almost seemed to make a point of not discussing the American indian wars, battles, and subsequent demise of the people who where here before us.  Anyhow it was just not entierly what I expected.  But we had a good time and had some indian(feathers not dots...I know how terribly unPC of me) food.

Next was the Art museum.  The kids seemed to enjoy it so long as we kept a pretty quick pace.  We also noted when we came in the signature blacked out SUV's of the Secret service out front.  Then we noted that we ended up in several of the galleries with the guys with the star pins and the ear pieces.  It was pretty amazing how good they were at their job...it took a lot of snooping before I could even tell who they were protecting.  I still don't know who the people were but I was not bold enough to be like "hey, I see you have SS protection, who are you?"

We walked back down to where we parked and drove past what I had hoped would be blooming Cherry Blossms...the purpose of the trip this weekend to find there were none.  The trees are late blooming this year, boo.  Then it was hotel, pool, bed.

Day Two is a Zoo....

The National Zoo is awesome, it's free and it's really, really nice.  The animals even seemed happy to show off.  We saw all there is to see, I guess the highlight for me at least was the Orangutangs.  They have this amazing thing called the "O-line."  It's like a zip line that goes through the park that the Orangutangs can swing from up in the air and go from one building to another.  They literally swing over your head.  It was just awesome.

We are pretty "restrictive" when it comes to treats, goodies, and purchased snacks when we are out.  You know the stuffed animals, cotton candy, and popcorn "everyone"(according to Austin) gives their kids.  Ya, well our kids don't get that.  I think out of the fact that there are 4 of them and also I realized pretty early on that if you never say yes to the grocery store check out line stuff(only moms will know what I am talking about here) they eventually will stop asking you for it.  So basically we told them when we went in we were not going to be buying them lunch, snacks, or stuff there.  I brought snacks, they have stuff, and when we were done we'd go get lunch.  They however, decided to whine the whole time about getting something, anything.  It started with Ice cream even though it was like 40degrees out, then it was popcorn, then they "only" wanted a smashed $2 penny....poor kids.
But, aside from that it was great even the Panda bears came out to say Hello.

Ya so what....

Just how much can you squeeze into one blog.

 

 

I am full of great ideas, but Hannah had an even better one.  Somehow, and this probably shows I don't monitor my kids Internet use closely enough, Hannah discovered baking shows on the Internet.  She loves them and quickly learned she loves to watch people make cupcakes.  So once she saw this "Rainbow cupcake" idea there was no question we would be making them, after all she now knew how.  So with every dish I had, 2 boxes of cake, more food coloring than you should eat in a year, and one HUGE mess we had Rainbow cupcakes.  And they were wonderful.

 Somehow, and I sill cannot believe this, I have an 11 year old.  It does not seem possible that 11 years has passed but it has.  We let the kids pick where they want to eat on their birthdays and for the last 4 or maybe 5 years Austin has picked the Olive Garden.  This year was no different, only there is no Olive Garden here is Charlottesville.  So we had to drive to Lynchburg which is about 1 1/2 hours away so that we could keep the streak going.  It was really fun, the kids were all great.  Todd and I decided at dinner that if he does not get a job we are finding a way to move back to Europe, and all in all it was a great evening.

I don't know why I look that way...oh wait I do I am at dinner with 4 kids.

 

The girls started taking gymnastics, they love it!

Monsters and Monster cupcakes

 The birthday Party.  So I lost track of how many invitations we had given out so with the prospect of having 20 10+year olds in our  house because it was raining was going to be, well...fun.  So I made a quick plan of feeding them lost of sugar, giving them 10 bags of jumbo marshmallows and setting them loose in the den to have a "snowball fight."  By the end every pillow in our  house was in use as a "Fortress" and there were marshmallows being thrown everywhere by everyone including Todd who seemed determined to get anyone who did not seem like they were interested in playing.    Everyone survived they had a blast and we will be finding marshmallows until we move.

Cousin Elli and Anna came to visit!  The girls, myself included, had a great time.  Anna cooked for us.  I tried to pretend to object but I am selfish and she's a great cook so we let her. The girls of so funny together, they played dress up, ponies, and then danced around.

We Decided to get out of town at the last minute and went to the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

That is actually THE grave digger, or one of them.  It is from Kitty Hawk NC and when we flew by that thing on the way there I had to turn around so that we could go see it.

  

What we did most of our time there, you can see Todd in the background working out.

It's about a 4 hour drive from here so not too bad.  I found a hotel with a pool and the kids were more than game for that.  We loaded everyone into the car and headed out.  Sierra had the last(we hope) of the stomach flu we had passed around so she had spent the better part of the morning throwing up. My hope was that once we hit the road she would have nothing left to throw up.  This should be good material for my "Mother of the year award."  Anyhow, off we went.  Kids were pretty good in the car, no one threw up and we found ourselves on a tiny sliver of land known as the Outer banks.  

 The hotel was right on the beach and we scored a room on the ground floor next to not only the pool but also the game room so we were good to go.  Everything we needed was within 20 yards of our room...obviously if you were a young couple with no kids this would be like getting the room right by the ice machine, but for us it was perfect.  The weather was awful but we just made the best of it.  We went to the beach, collected shells, found a crab we named "Bo."  He was dead but made a great pet, in fact we gave him to a friend as a birthday gift when we got home.  We went to the Wright Brothers national park where we learned a lot and the kids became Jr Rangers.  The kids were supposed to tour the museums and exhibits, watch a movie, and fill out a booklet in order to earn their badge.  Thinking it was a rather cursory thing in order to earn your plastic badge I basically cheated and helped Austin fill out his as it was the hardest.  I guessed a lot, left stuff blank I didn't know, and generally did a rather poor job.  I asked Todd to go help the kids turn them in and get their badges but when 20 minutes later he still had not returned I went looking.  There they were correcting all the mistakes I had make on Austins.  Apparently they take this Jr Ranger stuff seriously.  The kids were sworn in and received their badges.  

Orville and us.

Birthplace of flight so we had to try ourselves. 

Correcting the errors your mother makes when she tries to help you cheat. 

Being sworn in.