First Day in Washington D.C.

We stayed in Springfield, VA which is about 7 or 8 miles from most of the Washington D.C. monuments. There is a consultant who is staffed onsite for the next 6 months who gave Ken a ride to work and back everyday and we chose to stay in a hotel close to him. It worked out great for me because Ken left for work at 7am and I rarely woke up with him. The kids and I would usually stay out until 5- 6pm and Ken would get off between 3-4pm. It gave us more time to play and Ken time to get some of his normal work done because the site he was working at was in complete lock down, he couldn't use the Internet or cell phones, and sometimes even his computer. In fact one day he "accidentally" was accessing his wi-fi from his cellphone that was in a lockbox and the security team came and found him and told him he had to stop.

There was a Metro station a mile from our hotel so we took that most days into the city. My kids loved riding the metro. On our second trip we realized maybe taking the metro wasn't such a great idea because it took us 35 minutes to get into the city instead of 10. There wouldn't have been any traffic at the hours we wanted to go and then we could have taken the commuter lane back which goes super fast. Oh well, they had a blast and at least I didn't have to find parking. Everyone was super nice to us in D.C. It made me love the city even more! One lady just came up and asked us if we wanted her to take our picture.
This was one of our crazy days. We walked to the White House Visitor's Center and toured it. I would say it wasn't all that interesting for the kids. I thought it was interesting though. We didn't even walk past the White House though because the kids were hungry and they wanted to eat by the Washington Mall. At least they did until we walked about a hundred blocks. It wasn't really but it felt like it:-) We were going pretty slow, it was really only about a mile. Which my girls walk 1-2 miles regularly so I don't really know why it was an issue, especially because the weather was a perfect 82 degrees.

Then we broke down and decided to take the metro to the Air and Space museum. Which was really awesome. My kids totally loved the hands on areas they got to play with in the 15 minutes we were there.
It turns out that they were having some special Black Tie event that evening so they closed the museum early. Lovely, huh! After all that walking, where we passed a bunch of other amazing museums that we wanted to visit too. Anyway, so we went back to the mall.

Here is the Capitol Building.
National Archives
Darin used his special powers to control the squirrel.
His siblings were super impressed! (BTW- this is a real squirrel, Ken didn't believe us that it was:-) This was the point in our day where we kind of all gave up our expectations and started having fun.
We went to the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum. Most of the museums in D.C. are free because they are either national museums or Smithsonian museums. We learned that James Smithson donated his estate to the United States even though he had never even set foot in America. It's really quite an interesting story and you can find it here.

Rose, Nathan and Ginger loved trying to pose like they were being attacked by a wild animal. Most of the pictures didn't turn out though because they are encased in glass. Here is Ginger's attempt. Darin did not like doing it and apparently he has seen Night at the Museum too many times because he stayed a good 10 feet away from any of the dinosaurs. Silly boy:-)


Dinosaur Eggs

The girls were doing silly dances in this area. Ginger called hers the Ants in your Pants dance. Rose called hers the Mermaid Dance.

It was too funny, and then the boys came up behind us and scared us by peeking their heads through the plants. I totally jumped!
Flying Squirrels
The Hope Diamond. I totally thought it would be bigger. They set it in a more contemporary necklace design.
A bunch of other pretty jewels. Rose totally loved looking at them and took quite a few pictures. They were very beautiful. It's just strange for me to think that people/royalty wore these to everyday things like dinner.


Ginger tried to break off some pretty quartz. There is actually a plaque encouraging them to touch it and take home a piece.
The rest of the day we spent walking back to the metro and enjoying our surroundings. It was actually 7pm when we left the museum so the streets were pretty quiet, especially around the government buildings.

My kids will try to balance on any little thing and then walk in a line. It was good to be around them all day and hear them laugh and talk about whatever, on-topic or not.
I told Ken that it reminded me of being in London and Paris. But even nicer! It was extremely clean and everyone was so nice. Everyone was super nice to us in Europe too, but it's nice to be in a historic city where you can understand the language, if that makes sense. And I guess, I totally expected people in D.C. to be rushed, harried, and rude. I feel terrible now that I ever thought that because we had such an opposite experience. I think they were way more friendly then Texans.


In fact the Subway workers were so nice to us that when I asked them where the bathroom was so Rose could go the guy unlocked their personal bathroom and locker area just for my children to use it because he said the other bathroom was too long of a walk for my little girls.

Here we are waiting for the next train, we couldn't be on our feet any longer. We had a great day in the city!