DC Vacation Day one

Here we are at the Subway station and trying to figure out who needs a subway pass, how much money to put on each pass, and how to work the machine

Jim is going to hate me for saying this, but he couldn't figure it out, and wouldn't listen to me, and so since we had that whole touristy look about us, a nice lady working at Pentagon City Station came over and helped us out.

Here we are on the way to the Smithsonian. Contrary to Caleb's position in this picture, it was not a rough ride. In fact we find the DC Subway system quite enjoyable compared to NYC.

If you look close, Caleb seems to have something around his face. In the car on the way down, He emptied his gatoraid bottle and then got his lips stuck in the bottle, giving himself a nice hickey around his lips.

Yeah. Momma was not too happy about that one.

And so off we were on the blue line headed towards the Smithsonians.

Our game plan for the day: American History Museum and then the Natural History Museum.

We never did make it to the Natural History Museum... ( much to our disappointment- we really wanted to see the dinosaurs and their butterfly exhibit!)
The American History Museum had a great exhibit that took most of our day to get through

It was called "American's At War" and it was a fascinating look at how we have changed from an original George Washington uniform to a Piece of melted steel from the World trade center.

I'll post more on that later!

where does the time go???

The birthday girl

Today she is 13

She starts 8th grade next week, her last year of Jr. High

Which means that next year she starts .... high school

Will Jim and I survive the teenage years?

Fact: It will take another 13 years before we are out of the teenage years altogether.

Be afraid for us.

very afraid.

School Haircuts

Abby and I have been talking about how she wants her hair for school this year.

Currently, this is her number one favorite hair inspiration. We've been watching warehouse 13 on syfy and she loves Claudia and her hair.

Every week she has a different color streak. which Abby thinks is awesome and has visions of a lime green streak of her own. (which I haven't ruled out yet, but I haven't said yes to yet either. )

She has been trying to grow her longer. But I think this hair cut may have changed her mind.


We shall see. We have 3 weeks till she gets it cut. Silently I'm rooting for this cut. I think she looks cute, cute, cute with short hair.

We went to AC for the AC...

By about 2:00pm we had spent about 4 hours on the beach. It was hot as blazes, the undertow was severe and we were a burning like toast. So we decided to skip the boardwalk at Ocean City NJ, travel up the coastline to Atlantic City.

Best decision we made the whole trip. It gave us about a half hour in a nice air conditioned car. They kids were able to rest, and everyone was excited to head to the rainforest cafe.

We walked a little bit on the boadwalk, but everyone was hot, cranky and sunburned by this point and so we spent most of our time in the air conditioned mall on the pier waiting until we were hungry enough to go out to eat.

These pictures were taken at the end of the pier at an observation deck:







The temp was over 100, the humidity was severe. We had to put aside our perfect beach day plans and play it by ear. After all, these trips are about having fun and not about sticking to the plan even though everyone is miserable.

And that's when we found this:



In the nice air conditioned mall, they had a three story water feature show.



It really was awesome, one of the highlights of our trip that we would have never found if the day had perfect beach weather.



And this is where our camera's battery died, and so there are no pictures of the water square dancing, our kids expressions after they realized how neat the water feature show really was, any pictures of our dinner at the Rain Forest Cafe, or of the kids as they dozed in the car on the way home after the beach trip they had begged for.