the adventures of mama and little eggrolls

Day Two - Museums! Better late than never, right? =)

After walking through the entire town the day before, Josh and I both decided we were willing to take a taxi to start off our museum day. We called a cab from our hotel and gladly paid the $13 to take us to the doorway of our first stop!

I was so excited to go to the Smithsonian Museums, because they are just completely cool. BUT I was a little worried about if my kids would really think they are cool; I mean, really...kids just want to play. Museums don't always equal play! But the Smithsonian Museums have SO much stuff for children, I shouldn't have worried a bit!

I was planning on spending a good chunk of time at the Museum of American History, and they had a self-guide for families with kids 0-5. I printed off a copy for each of the girls and told them they were the leaders for the morning. They loved being in-charge, and it made them really look forward to searching for and finding the right exhibits.

They started consulting their guides as soon as we stepped out of the taxi.

The guide had us start at the 3rd floor and work our way down. We were all fascinated by a huge dollhouse that was completely outfitted with everything you could imagine.
We then had to find Kermit the Frog and Dorothy's ruby-red slippers. Down on the second floor, we had to find a statue of George Washington...
...and imitate his posture!
The first floor had two amazing sections full of hands-on kids activities. There were also displays of very old toys, like this Mr. Potato Head!
This exhibit encouraged children to use tools and objects from daily life in new ways to make new things. With Daddy's capable help, they constructed a very successful mini-pinball machine.
Even Abby joined in on the fun! (Or just came by to start messing with things...)
There were so many fun things for them to try - experimenting with wind positions:
...how to achieve balance:
...and how to deal with disappointment when your block tower crashes to the ground!
While Josh and the girls were having great fun with the experiments, Abby was more interested in all the things that are produced from Kevlar materials, like this canoe:
We got to see Julia Child's kitchen, and I snapped this picture for my friend Rachel - just wondering...how could she use SO many pans on a routine basis? That's a LOT of cooking!
The sections on American Transportation and Travel were fascinating and so well done - do I sound like such a loser that I enjoyed the history museum so much?
The original idea was to spend just an hour or so at the Museum of American History and then pop over to the National Gallery of Art where they have tons of special crafts and activities for kids. As it turned out, we spent too much time at the American History museum, so we scratched the Art plans and popped in to the Natural History museum to see the dinos.

My kids haven't seen the Night at the Museum movies, so there wasn't much I thought they'd be too interested in...but I knew the dinosaurs would be a big hit. They didn't even know that dinosaurs even existed before Peter and Alex introduced this idea to them, but since Peter and Alex think dinosaurs are cool, so do Emma and Samantha.

Emma was particularly fond of this baby dinosaur skeleton; even though it's bigger than a human, it actually does look tiny compared to an adult skeleton right next to it!
We grabbed an expensive bite to eat at the Natural History museum and then booked it over to the Air and Space Museum to see rocketships and make our IMAX movie time.

After seeing all the great stuff there - sorry, no guides printed out this time! - we headed back to the hotel for an evening of swimming. I remember during many of our family vacations, my parents would spend tons of money to get us to special places - Disneyland, the Grand Canyon - and inevitably, our favorite parts of the trip were swimming together in the hotel pool. Or staying up late watching movies in the room. I'm sure it drove my parents crazy! But it was true - just relaxing, being together, getting to do fun stuff that we don't usually get to do...those were some of the best parts of the trip.

And today I've got a two-for-one special...Since I only took three pictures on the day we went to the National Zoo, I'm going to include it here:
Yep, that was the only one I took. It was over 100 degrees that day (not the best day to go to the zoo, huh?) and we were hot from the moment we stepped off the Metro. Most of the animals were chilling out away from the public eye, so that was really a bummer. There were some exotic birds that we got to see and the Small Mammal indoor exhibit was fun (think armadillos and meerkats) but overall, the Zoo was kind of a bust. I'm sure it was the heat and the season that we went, otherwise it would have been great! The National Zoo has tons of great resources, scavenger hunts and worksheets for kids - it was tragic that we were too hot to use them!

In my opinion, there were so many fun things we could do as a family in Washington DC. I feel like we only skimmed the surface, and we managed to do it in a way that our kids didn't think we were totally lame history-buffs.

So that wraps up our DC trip. I guess that means I need to start taking some pictures so I'll have something to blog about!