Washington D.C. - The National Mall

We spent a good amount of time at the National Mall. For those who are confused (as I was the first time hearing it), the National Mall is not full of stores for shopping, it's an outdoor national park that houses many famous memorials and monuments. 

We saw the Washington Monument.

And then the boys started break dancing for no reason. 

It was extremely cute.

We gazed up at the tall monument for a while. 

We got lunch from some of the many food trucks parked right by the mall.

 

This was my first exposure to food trucks and I know that's a small sample size, but I was not impressed. The food was decent (nothing spectacular) and way overpriced. Maybe it's just because we were in D.C. where I'm sure the cost of food is way more than Indiana, but that's still no excuse to charge 9 bucks for a simple cheese quesadilla. At least that price included a soda!

We walked from the Washington Monument across the rest of the mall to the Lincoln Memorial.

The Lincoln memorial is that building waaaaay off in the distance.

We passed the war memorials on the way. 

The World War II memorial.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

I think this memorial is beautiful and Dallin enjoyed tracing the letters in the names of the soldiers.

He was busy finding all the "D" letters.

 The Korean War veterans memorial.

It was a very sobering experience to be reminded of the wars and all the people who fought to protect our country in those wars. I felt extreme gratitude for those soldiers, especially when surrounded by other tourists who seemed less than grateful. At the Korean War memorial, we overheard one person say, "Wow, they'll make a memorial for anything, won't they?" Yes, when hundreds of thousands of people go to war (including my own grandpa) to protect the freedom of others, I think that merits a memorial and a little respect. 

The Lincoln Memorial.

Connor seemed less than impressed by it. I think he was hot and sick of walking by this point. He was in the stroller for half the time, and carried on shoulders for another quarter of it, so I had little sympathy for his fatigue.

The view from the Lincoln Memorial, looking back across the mall to the Washington Monument. 

Last stop was the White House. 

It doesn't seem like it in the picture because of the zoom on the camera, but we were about 1/2 mile away from the White House. That is the closest we were allowed to get. (Seriously, I took one step closer on the grass across the imaginary line and was told by the secret service to step back please.) Apparently, they close the lawn in front of the White House for various security reasons at any given time. The secret service officer we talked to wasn't at liberty to say why, but just that it happens from time to time. Weird... 

On the walk back, we stopped to let Dallin get a Spongebob popsicle.

It was $3 (more food truck rip offs!!) but so worth it to see him enjoy it. It only took 5 baby wipes to clean up the resulting stickiness.

That was the end of our trip! Every day was long and exhausting (and hot!) but we got to see some really cool places learn a lot of American history. And we checked some things off our summer list!

Washington D.C. - The Smithsonians

During our trip in June, we went to the Smithsonian National Zoo in DC.

(You can kind of see my 16 week pregnant belly barely poking out in this picture.)

We somehow chose the hottest day of our entire trip to spend outside at the zoo all day. We each brought a water bottle and had to stop for refills about every 30 minutes, but we stayed hydrated! We really liked the zoo. The pandas were really neat to see and the boys always love to see gorillas.

One of the best memories of our zoo visit was seeing the orb weaver spiders in the Invertebrate house. (So memorable that I didn't think to take any pictures of it.) The spider "enclosure" is separated from the rest of the room only by a 2 foot ledge. It is an open display with no glass, nothing to physically keep the large spiders from roaming free around the zoo. We could literally have reached out and touched the spiders, but most people would be too frightened to do that, so the spiders stay safe. Once the female has built her web, these 4 or 5 inch long spiders will never leave their web. They are mostly blind, so they stay on their web and wait until bugs are caught, then they follow the web vibrations to their prey. We happened to be there when the spiders were being fed. A volunteer zoo keeper had a container of small crickets and he would try to gently place one cricket at a time on the web for the spider to eat. He wasn't having any luck getting the crickets to stick to the web, so the spider never made it down the web far enough to eat the cricket, and the cricket would fall down into the bushes and mulch below (The real reason for the 2 foot ledge around the spiders: to keep the fallen crickets contained.) Eventually, the container of crickets ran out and we still did not get to see the spider eat. Mckay saw a cricket walking by in the mulch in the open of the enclosure, so he reached down and caught it quickly, I think intending to give the volunteer another shot at feeding, but by this time, the volunteer had already walked away. Now Mckay was standing there with his hands cupped around a cricket, wondering what to do with it. So he threw it into the web of one of the spiders. The cricket stuck and the spider instantly slid down the web and began to eat the cricket! It was amazing to watch! Several fellow bystanders cheered, quietly applauded Mckay and patted him on the back. He finally gave us the show we had all been waiting for! And then we quickly got out of there before Mckay tried to catch another cricket. 

***

 Another day, we saw the rest of the Smithsonian Museums. There were a few we were interested in seeing in a short span of time, so we planned an hour in each one. That's not nearly enough time to really see each one, but it gave us a little taste.

 The Air and Space Museum was a hit.

 The boys really liked all the "skeletons" at the Natural history museum.

The American history museum was also really cool. I wish we'd been able to spend more time there.

 This Spongebob mail box we found was definitely worth photographing.

Inside the Smithsonian Castle, there was a replica of said castle on display made from Legos.

An otherwise uninteresting building was now very interesting to the kids.

We also stopped by the Library of Congress.

This is as close as you can get. This picture was taken from the viewing room, which you can enter and see into the library from behind a thick glass wall. We really thought we'd get to go in and see shelves and shelves of books, so we were a little bummed. The movie National Treasure is suddenly seeming very unrealistic. (The plot was still totally plausible in my mind until now. :)  )

We did go to the gift shop thought and Mckay tried to steal the Declaration of Independence.

More on D.C. and the national mall to come. I'm almost done blogging about June!

More Baltimore

While in Baltimore, we visited a friend of ours from freshman year of college at BYU. Ben Pacini lived on the same floor of the dorm as Mckay and they became really good friends. Ben lives in Baltimore now and it was really great to catch up and meet his wife and son. We decided to meet downtown one day for lunch at a Thai restaurant. This was supposed to be the best Thai food in town but, unfortunately we never got to taste the food. Shortly after being seated, we were told that there was a gas leak in the kitchen and they would have to close for the day. Still craving Thai food, we made a plan B. A nice couple the next table over told us about their second favorite Thai restaurant that was only a few blocks away. We walked over there only to find a sign on the door.

"Sorry, we are closed today." Mckay was not impressed.

We settled on a nearby Chipotle. Not Thai, but still tasty.

Ben teaches middle school math in inner city Baltimore, so he gave us a little driving tour of the neighborhoods surrounding his school. It was very humbling to see some of the living conditions that his students are in and hear stories of the challenges they face.

Later in the trip, we went to Ben's house and the 3 little boys had a blast playing together.

 

They were all singing, screaming, yelling and dancing, each in their own world. It was great dinner entertainment.

***

We had to do a paddle boat tour of the Baltimore inner harbor. At the rental place, the boat choices were a regular paddle boat or a "Chessie" monster paddle boat. Can you guess which one we choose?

The Chessie boat was more enclosed and had safer seats for the kids, so our choice was strictly safety related. It had nothing to do with the boys wanting the cool looking boat...

This wasn't explained to us at all at the harbor, but since coming home and looking it up, I've discovered the meaning behind the boat name. "Scotland may have its "Nessie" but only at the Inner Harbor will you spot a Chasapeake Bay 'Chessie' Monster." (From the paddleboat website)

Connor loved it so much he could hardly keep his eyes open.

We got to paddle around the harbor for 30 minutes. 

It was a very small roped off area, so 30 minutes was plenty of time.

(Another group in a Chessie boat)

Our next stop was Fort McHenry, where Francis Scott Key wrote the Star-Spangled Banner during the War of 1812.

(Technically, Key was not at the fort when the events detailed in the song took place. He was being detained on a British ship at the time. Fun fact for you...)

It was a cloudy cool day and we used public transportation to get around that day. The bus drops off right at the gates to Fort McHenry, with a short 1/4 mile walk to the Visitors Center from there. Rain came pouring down as soon as we got off the bus so that by the time we made the short walk to the visitors center, we were soaked. We looked around the little museum and watched a short movie while we waited for our clothes to dry a bit. The rain let up eventually and we walked the rest of the way out to the fort.

We explored all the dark, musty storage rooms.

And we only had to lock up the boys once.

  

It was really interesting to learn/relearn about our nation's history. And thanks to the National Park Service creating the Access Pass, people with a permanent disability (e.g. Dallin) can get a lifetime pass to visit all the national parks for free. The National Parks are even cooler when they're free.

(Pass information found HERE)

Since Washington D.C. is only an hour from Baltimore, we planned a little extra time after Mckay's conference to visit DC. More on that to come...

Baltimore or bust!

In June, Mckay presented at a conference in Baltimore. Like we did for the same conference one year ago in Minnesota, we decided that the whole family should come along and we'd make a little vacation/road trip out of it.

The morning we left Indiana, we pulled the boys straight out of bed and put them into the car. We threw them a pancake to eat and began driving.

(Cheetos must be our favorite road trip snack.)

Connor looks like he's still waking up.

The 10 hour drive was great. I didn't realize how green and tree-filled the east is. We drove on some highways with gorgeous views.

We stopped to eat dinner about an hour outside Baltimore. Can you guess where we ate?

Cafe Rio!!!

I haven't been to a Cafe Rio in 4 years and it tasted just as good as I remembered. Now that our children are getting old enough to require their own meal when we eat out, we were pleasantly surprised to see that they offered a free kids quesadilla (to kids 6 and under-maybe?). It's a simple corn tortilla with cheese on it, but that's all our kids would have eaten anyway. 

 On Sunday (Father's Day), we went to a nearby church. Mckay was very disappointing that it was stake conference for this ward and we didn't get to hear any talks about fathers. We relaxed at the hotel, drove around a bit and went to see the Washington DC temple grounds and visitor center.

I'm always amazed at how much effort goes into landscaping/maintaining the temple grounds. It is a wonderful, beautiful place.

The rest of the week, while Mckay was at the conference, we went to see fun things around Baltimore. I found this really cool library not far from downtown that has a really interesting children's area called Storyville. It's essentially a small, free children's museum contained within the library that has lots of fun activities for the kids with a big emphasis on literacy. They request no electronic usage (except for cameras) so that parents stay engaged with their children while they explore/learn.

Connor took care of diapering the babies and doing the laundry while Dallin "cooked" in the play kitchen.

Next we visited the construction site where there were lots of puzzles and building toys.

Near each station/section in the library is a shelf of books with topics related to that particular area. I was semi-proud that we were already familiar with most of the books in the construction section and that Connor could recite most of them along with me. I guess our local library is not to shabby either...

I did a puppet show with the two boys about the three little pigs and the wolf. Here is their retelling of the story:

script from the show:

Dallin (wolf): (prolonged knocking at the door) Hi, can I play at your house?

Connor (pig): Can I play at your house?

Dallin (wolf): I want to blow your house... (Blowing sounds)

(all the puppets fall down)

Roles switched:

New script:

Connor (wolf): Little pig, let me in!

(blowing sounds)

Dallin (pig): Can I play at your house? Please, I want to play at your house!

(fighting with puppets)

Somehow they think this story is about playing at a friend's house...

There was a fishing/wildlife area. 

And a grocery store.

I know it's video overload, but I loved watching them check out their own groceries.

I guess they are learning and picking up a lot from their surroundings, even at the grocery store.

After the library, I drove back to downtown, getting lost several times along the way. We finally found our way to the harbor.

We walked around for a while and waited for Mckay to be finished for the day, then joined him and his colleagues for dinner. Dinner was great until Connor threw up on me. We left quickly after and I got lost once again walking back to the parking garage. It was a fun day, but at the end of it, I was very glad to be back at our hotel.

Strawberries and hiking

Last month we went to a local farm to pick strawberries!

The field was a little damp/muddy from rain the day before so we wore boots and prepared to get dirty.

The beautiful strawberries were all bright red, sweet and juicy. 

Connor and Dallin helped pick for a few minutes and then they just watched me pick the rest. Thanks, guys. The farmers gives you an orange flag so you can mark where you left off picking on your row for the convenience of the next picker. Dallin took care of holding the flag for us.

Connor took pictures for me. I'll spare you from most of the finger covered shots he took of other people picking with butts in the air. Here are his two best pictures: 

Not bad. 

We picked 6 pounds of strawberries. That was more than enough for snacking and making a lot of strawberry freezer jam.

Later that week, we went on a little hike with some friends at the nearby State Park.

Connor and his 2-year-old girl buddy held hands on the walk.

 Then Dallin and his 5-year-old girl buddy decided to join in the hand holding.

They tried walking with hands held in a circle, "Ring-around-the-rosie" style, but that proved very difficult for them.

So they finally settled on holding hands in a line. 

 Our friends will be moving in a few weeks, so we've been soaking up all the fun time we can get with them. We've really enjoyed getting to know their family these 4 years that we've lived here.