Washington DC

I was able to get Friday off work and Mike and I took the three youngest to Washington DC for the weekend. What a great time we had! They picked me up at work on Thursday evening and all came in to wait with me, for a mom who was late. Turned out she fell asleep and forgot to pick her baby up! Ugh. We finally got out of there and stopped a little over halfway to DC for dinner. We ate at Golden Corral and we all had a delicious dinner. Alex started with his smart mouth, so that part sucked, but most of the dinner was fun. I don't know why that boy can never shut his mouth when he needs to. He is, for the most part, a great kid, but the smart mouth is killing us!

We ended up arriving in DC around 10ish, I think. We unpacked, watched a little tv and hung out with Mike's work friend, Anet, who was also staying at the townhouse that night. We got to bed a little later than we wanted to, so we slept in a bit on Friday morning. We had been expecting rain and thunderstorms all day, but woke to a cool, sunny day. We decided to take the Metro train into DC, instead of driving, since it is really hard to find a place to park or van. The parking garages don't accommodate vehicles with the height of our van. It was fun to take the train. We started out at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, which I thought was pretty interesting. Although the kids said they liked it afterwards, it was sort of hard to tell while we were there, as they whined, moaned, complained and talked back most of the time. Alex was in his prime with the back talk and got his phone taken away for a good, long time. I really wanted to slap his face several times, but didn't want to get arrested! Oh, well, I got to see Julia Child's kitchen, so the annoyance was worth it!

After that museum, the kids decided they wanted to go to more. Go figure. Anyway, by then it was after 5:30, the time the other museums close. So we decided to abandon our idea of looking at cherry blossoms and having a picnic on Saturday and we spent another day at the museums instead. Good thing, since the cherry blossoms are gone! We drove in on Saturday, hoping for a street spot, which we found plenty of, but they were all two hour parking only. We drove around for awhile and then ended up driving out to the waterfront, near the marina where we found an above ground lot for only $10 a day. We parked there and took the bus to the National Mall, where all the Smithsonian museums are. We went to the Native American Museum, which had a wonderful show and gift store, the Air and Space Museum and The Museum of Natural History. The last museum had a cool butterfly habitat, which Hannah and I loved. I tried to get her to go in with me, even though it cost $6 per person, but she was afraid of the butterflies, since they land on people. When she was little, we took her into a bird habitat at Busch Gardens and they were landing on her and she freaked out. We settled for looking through the window and saved $12, but we both were longing to be in there, so we could see all of the butterflies. The view through the window was very limited, but we still saw some beauties.

We went to bed early last night, since we had to drop Mike off at the Richmond airport for a flight to Ohio. All in all, in spite of Alex's behavior and a bit of whining from the girls, it was a great trip!