In Washington, D.C.

I am really proud of myself for taking my babes to D.C. I'm a country girl, and although I've been to plenty of major cities, in plenty of countries around the world, I've never been there alone, and I've never been there on my own with two kiddos to take care of.

It doesn't help that many of my adventures in major cities have been kind of crazy. Hey, Mac, remember when we couldn't find a place to stay in London, so we slept on the lawn in front of the National Gallery, and that guy accidentally spat on me, but then he felt so terrible about it that he gave us something to smoke, but when we started smoking it we noticed that it tasted weird and you unwrapped it and it had what looked like filmstrip rolled up inside it?

Ooh, Matt, remember when WE were in London and our hostel was a total fire trap, and our bed had this creepy stained bedspread on it all embroidered with hearts, and the shower was directly over the toilet?

Hey, Mac, how about when we were in Amsterdam, and we got high and then decided to split up for a while, and I wandered around the same two blocks all day because I couldn't remember the name of our hostel, and you ended up out in the country?

Or Matt, remember on our honeymoon when we stayed in that hostel in Hawaii that turned out to just be some creepy guy's house, in that giant dormitory with all those other travelers' backpacks and bags on their beds and the hostel owner assured us that they were "around" but we never saw them, and then someone came in and stood in the women's bathroom while I was showering and then left several minutes later, but we never actually saw any other woman in the hostel, just that guy?

Ah, me in my twenties...now THAT was a good decade! And yet you see why I might have mistrusted my ability to construct a safe, kid-friendly big-city adventure.

I'm also nervous about city driving, the possibility of being mugged, and valet parking.

So, spoiler alerts: I did not get into a car accident, we were not mugged nor did we ever think we were about to be mugged, and while I did not actually "handle" the valet parking impeccably (how many times is the most ever times that someone has needed to get back into their car after handing it off to a valet? Add four, and you'll have reached my personal total), the valet and I totally hit it off (he's from Kenya, was perennially on duty and therefore happy to chat with us every time we were out and about, and could give me a first-hand comparison of the Grand Canyon to the Olduvai Gorge, where he used to run sight-seeing tours), AND I figured out how to do that handshake/pass him a big tip thing on our final morning. SCORE!!!

Matt got us a last-minute deal at a Sheraton within walking distance of the National Mall (when we travel, Matt is the Trixie to my Speed--he always books last-minute hotel deals online for us wherever we're staying, then gives me the hotel's address to plug into my GPS). It had an indoor rooftop pool, and a sandwich shop half a block away:

Evening ritual: walk down the street for sandwiches, bring them back to the hotel, swim for an hour, then eat!

In other words, it was perfect!

The afternoon that we arrived, it was far and away enough to go visit the valet three additional times, walk down the street for sandwiches--

I chose to blow my travel food budget because I just could NOT go back to the valet one more time to ask for my cooler and two blue crates of sandwich fixings, snack crackers, and fruit.

--swim for an hour, and hit the sack.

The next morning, however? Our mission was to see the sights!

There is so much to see in D.C. that scheduling is tricky, especially when we only had one full day. Willow really wanted to go to the zoo, for instance, but that likely would have taken an entire day on its own. Instead, I decided that we would stick to the National Mall area, and just see what we could comfortably see. We headed out on foot from our hotel a full two hours before the Smithsonian museums opened, so that we could meander past at least a couple of historical sites and monuments.

At the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, we saw the major sights--

Spirit of St. Louis

--but also did some typical hand-on science museum-y things--

--AND learned how things fly:

Did you get that? I now know how things fly! All of high school physics, in which all the boys just zipped right along and I never knew what the hell was going on, and it took one hour in the Smithsonian to help me unlock the mystery of flight.

You want to know, right? Okay, it goes like this: An airplane's wing is curved at the top so that the same amount of air has to travel a farther distance just to go from the front of the wing to the back of the wing. Since that same amount of air is spread over a greater space, there's less air there, and thus less air pressure. Therefore, the air at the bottom of the wing, which is traveling a shorter distance from front to back, has a greater air pressure, and pushes the wing up.

BOOM, lifted!

The only disappointment inherent in the Air and Space Museum was in its cafeteria options. I'd resigned myself to purchasing our lunch, but it was too chilly for the couple of outdoor options on the National Mall, I was unwilling to hike away from the Mall just to search for lunch, the kids were starving, and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum cafeteria served MCDONALD'S?!? 

Barf! So much for my strict policy of not purchasing fast food, sigh. And the worst part is that crap doesn't even fill you up! Seriously, the amount of money that I spent on burgers (with one box of fries and one drink with refills to split between the three of us) was mind-boggling, and the kids acted just as hungry an hour later as they did right before lunch. 

The peanut butter, jelly, whole wheat bagels, and giant apples hanging out in the trunk of my car in the valet parking garage were sorely missed, I can tell you. As boring as it had gotten by that point in our trip, at least you know when you eat a nice peanut butter and jelly bagel sandwich, with a giant apple on the side, that you're going to be full for a while.

We cheered ourselves up with the long-promised carousel ride:

I thought the price of the ride ($3.50 per rider) was absurd, but I knew to budget for it, since the girls spied it long ago in one of the children's guides to Washington, D.C. that we'd checked out of the library, and yes, of course it was worth it. Willow is getting old enough that I'm really starting to treasure things like carousel rides--I know all that stuff gets cool again later, but I'm pretty sure there's a window of childhood/adolescence in which carousel=social death, yes?

Our favorite museum by FAR was the Smithsonian Natural History Museum--I knew it would be. I wouldn't let the girls visit every single gallery on this trip, because I really wanted to see as much as possible just this first time, but we still managed to see a LOT:

All the high-tech exhibits in the museum, and the girls just adored these old-school, beaten-down dioramas.

This paleontologist is using a microscope with a mirror mount that allows him to see his sketch  without taking his eyes off of the lenses--I can't remember the name of this type of microscope, grr!

 Again, I was thrilled to see how much we saw that connects to our previous or ongoing studies:

MOLLUSKS!!!

CRINOIDS!!! We've never found ones THIS big in our creek!

I'm stealing this brief, thorough explanation for our classification of living things studies.

We've watched several documentaries that mention these cat mummies, but never actually seen one before.

THIS is part of the meteorite that hit Meteor Crater in Arizona--how cool to know that we've been there!

 I LOVE meteorites:

 In the Natural History Museum gift shop, I used my Smithsonian magazine subscription discount card to do a great deal of damage, to the tune of two spiky dinosaur backpacks, one stuffed Smilodon (Shh! It's for Christmas!), one stuffed woolly mammoth (double shh!!!), and one double-scoop of ice cream:

It's VERY hard to secretly shop for the kids with the kids right there, so I'm still on the look-out locally for one triops kit and one ornithopter.

But the backpacks did NOT get saved for Christmas. They're awesome, and we love them:

The Smithsonian Museum of American History was toured at my insistence, and so it was toured pretty briefly. The ruby slippers are out on tour, and for some reason the documents hall was locked, but we were stunned and impressed by the Star-Spangled Banner, and seeing this guy didn't hurt, either:

Sydney is doing her homeschool Biography Fair project on George Washington, so I partly insisted on visiting the Museum of American History because I figured that since we were in D.C. already, we had to see SOMETHING of George Washington's! Fortunately, in this museum we saw a lot:

George Washington's saber--we also saw a complete outfit of his, his camping gear, and a bunch of other stuff.

 I had toyed with the idea of visiting some other outdoor monuments in the evening, but by closing time at this museum, we were all VERY footsore and quite ready to walk the straight shot that it was to get back to our hotel. I knew that there was a metro stop that might save us a few blocks, but honestly, what with the figuring it out and the buying the fare and the navigating our way from our stop, I really preferred just to walk the extra blocks. I felt bad about it, though, because the kids were clearly exhausted, and Willow tearfully griped her way back to the hotel and then to the sandwich shop and back. Strangely enough, though, all griping ceased when I told them to get their swimsuits on, and all my guilt ceased as I watched them swim and splash and play and laugh for another hour in the pool after that long walk and before we ate our dinner.

And then after dinner, it was time for little girls and their wild ponies to go straight to bed:

We had a long drive ahead of us in the morning, back to Matt and the kitties!

We used the following resources for our Washington, D.C. study:
Virtual Tour of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History
Virtual Tour of the White House
Google Art Tour of the White House

On Assateague Island (Maryland Version)

Virginia and Maryland both own part of Assateague Island, and both parts contain wild ponies; there's a big fence that separates the herds of the two states. The Virginia ponies are famous, with the books about Misty and the yearly pony swim and the Misty movie filmed on location (Sydney LOVES that movie, by the way, even though it's sexist as hell); the Maryland ponies are far less famous.

Even though the Maryland-owned section of Assateague Island is just due north of the Virginia section, and it's not a huge island, it nevertheless took an hour to get there, since we had to drive back to the mainland, then up and over to come back down to Assateague from the north. I wouldn't have made a special trip, but it actually wasn't too far out of our way, and since my only plans for the day were to make the relatively short drive to D.C. and safely ensconce ourselves in our hotel there, we actually had plenty of time to kill for the extra adventure.

It was hilarious, after all the pony love in Virginia, to drive into Assateague State Park in Maryland and immediately be confronted with these huge signs all over the place warning us about the "feral ponies." The feral ponies bite, kick, and charge! There was a giant poster in the bathroom of kids showing off the bites that they had received from feral ponies! Beware the feral ponies! Oh, and there were ELECTRIC fences around some of the dunes on the beach, I guess to keep the feral ponies off of them, but they were fortunately down due to Hurricane Sandy, since I caught Sydney climbing on one--I swear, I took my eyes off of her for about one second, but who would suspect that there would be electric fences on a beach?!?

Unfortunately, we didn't actually see any of these "feral ponies" in Maryland; we drove around a bit, but I didn't want to press my luck by pressing the babes into another hike, especially since we already had GREAT memories of the ponies that we'd already seen. Instead, we took advantage of an undamaged beach road to hit the beach!

Yes, the weather was just as windy and bitterly cold as it looks here. One thing that I've learned about my girls, though, is that although they're wimps when it comes to hiking, they are fearless in the face of cold. I actually just bought myself some silk long johns so that I can stick with them less miserably this winter, because those kids, they just play and play and play and act like they don't even notice that we're all freezing our butts off.

This beach was a great place to demonstrate the actions of sand dunes, because it was so windy that you could clearly see the sand shifting:

It was mesmerizing.

Again, the nature center was fabulous--I have never seen such happy tanked marine critters! The nature center in Virginia was light on critters, since many of them had been released before Hurricane Sandy in case there would be power outages, but the remaining mollusks seemed comfy and happy to move around and didn't freak out upon being picked up and petted, and the Maryland critters were just the same:

I'd never before seen mollusks that didn't withdraw or otherwise seem to care much about being picked up, and the other tank creatures were just as lively:

That starfish covers a lot of ground!

My kids LOVE a good nature center, and they loved this one:

Willow didn't spend a penny of her money on this vacation (and she had 53 dollars!), but Sydney blew all her vacation money in the gift shop here, on one stuffed wild pony. She was desperate for the other two, but lacked the funds--I checked the tag, however, and noted their web site, so Santa may have a stuffed pony surprise in store for her on Christmas morning. I purchased a horse anatomy coloring book for our science studies, and that, combined with the giant horseshoe crab shell that we found on the beach, consisted of our souvenirs for this excursion.

Don't worry, though--in Washington, D.C., I bought the girls something REALLY crazy.

On Assateague Island (Virginia Version)

My road trips tend to get out of hand.

It goes something (okay, exactly...) like this:

My dear friend moved away from me to go live on top of a mountain in North Carolina, taking her two daughters, my two daughters' dear friends, along with her (her husband went, too). Her mountain is 8.5 hours away from here. Obviously, we HAVE to take a road trip to go visit her!

While planning our trip to go spend a couple of nights with our friends, I start to think, "Hmm...we'll already have done the work of driving 8.5 hours; I wonder what's near-ish there, but really far from here, that we could go visit?"

It turns out that Chincoteague Island, Virginia, is another 8.5 hours from my friend's mountain, but not entirely in the opposite direction from home, so that we could, say, go visit the wild ponies that live there, spend a couple of nights, and not have to drive 17 hours back home.

As a matter of fact, right on our way home, a mere three hours from Chincoteague Island...is Washington, D.C.!

And from Washington, D.C., it's only 10.5 hours back home! Heck, I do the ten-hour drive from my parents' house in Arkansas at least twice a year! I've done a 14-hour drive from Florida before!

And that's how a two-night road trip to visit my dear friend turned into a week-long road trip, and how after a wonderful stay on top of a mountain in North Carolina, the girls and I found ourselves on the Virginia Coast, on a teeny-tiny island, stalking our prey...

...the elusive wild pony:

Those darn ponies actually were pretty elusive, and I was thrilled that we found them during our first morning hike--took some of the pressure off, you know? You knew that they were around because there were piles of pony poop everywhere, but the ponies themselves weren't exactly galloping up to you for treats and rides around the paddock. You had to go hike around and look for them!

I chose a 1.6-mile hiking route (hesitantly, because I know my girls well) that promised a couple of good places for pony spotting. And they were good! In our first spot, after hanging out a while and preparing to leave disappointed, I spotted something moving WAY far away in the trees, and it turned into a fabulous opportunity for two very excited little girls to get to use the binoculars, as we watched an entire herd go by, pony after pony, through its lenses.

Later on our hike we actually left the trail, as again we spotted something moving, and this time our range was much closer:




If we bring along our galoshes next time, we'll be able to get even closer! But here we were able to spy on the ponies to our hearts' content, as they munched and walked around and went "Nye-he-he-he!" to each other--ah, the life of a wild pony! For the rest of the hike, we continued to follow little pony-made paths off of the trail, exploring their hidey-holes and gathering places and wandering grounds.

I'd planned for us to hit the beach next, and unfortunately this turned into a pretty big deal, because Hurricane Sandy had destroyed enough of the road that leads to the beach for it to be closed to car traffic. You could still get there, and to the nature center next to it, but only after another mile-or-so hike. My poor Will at first flat-out refused, inspiring my first of (a surprisingly small number of) the series of lectures entitled, "If you want to experience so-and-so, THIS is what you have to do. If you don't want to experience so-and-so, we might as well drive home now and go sit on our couch for the rest of the week." Frowny faces at my parenting, I know, but from my perspective, it's not actually a threat--if the kiddos don't want to explore the stuff, we seriously might as well call it a trip and head home; I'm certainly not going to wheedle them through an entire road trip.

Anyway, it turns out that the kiddo didn't want to call it a trip, and did decide to muscle through yet another hike, and I feel as if she learned two things from the experience:

1. Trudging along a flat, sea-level road isn't nearly as bad as trudging along an up-and-down, up-and-down Indiana hiking trail (I'm afraid our Indiana hikes have given the girls hiking PTSD!), and
2. Yay, Atlantic Ocean!

We did a basic unit on mollusks after our trip to the Florida beach, so while beachcombing, when Sydney spied a certain special something, she knew exactly what it was, brought it excitedly to me, and yep, we did pack it in the trunk of the car to take home and study some more:

a mollusk's egg case!!!

We brought it into the fabulous nature center there, where the ranger on duty identified it as belonging to a whelk. Fortunately, the nature center was a superb place to explore out of the cold wind--

--and doing so let the girls work their will back up for the walk back to the car.

I was pleased at the level to which this trip built upon our mollusks study, and I think that with this, we've officially established visiting literary landmarks as one of our focuses. Why else drive 8.5 hours just to visit the setting of Misty of Chincoteague?

Because it turned out to be an AWESOME trip, that's why!

We used the following materials to prepare for our trip to see the wild ponies:

Coast to Coast and Home Again

Thursday, November 15, at the Atlantic Ocean on Assateague Island, Virginia

Sunday, November 25, at the Pacific Ocean outside of San Francisco, California

And now we're back in our own beds again!

So.....goodnight.

On the Road Again

The girls and I are driving off to visit some friends, see the Chincoteague wild ponies (fingers crossed!), and tour the National Mall.

We'll see you right back here when we're home again!

Still Life with Chess Pieces

Will and I still have a regular (and fun!) chess study together. We play often, with me at various levels of handicaps from the slight to the slightly ridiculous--

If there was a tutor to be had I'd obtain one for her, but as it is we subsist, as well, on episodes of Elliott Chess School, bi-monthly chess club meetings, games of Fritz and Chesster, and the odd chess puzzle.

We don't have one complete chess set between us, but instead dozens of partial sets that we cobble together to play, with several dozen other chess pieces sitting unused in Will's chess bag during any given game. While we play, Sydney amuses herself greatly with the single activity that is perhaps Willow's most hated thing for her sister to do (in other words, she hates this even MORE than when Sydney says "It doesn't care" instead of "It doesn't matter," and even more than when Sydney plays audiobooks at bedtime without plugging in her headphones, and even more than when I ask the girls if they want to go to the library and Sydney says that she doesn't):

She plays with the unused chess pieces.

A lover of small things, Sydney sets elaborate scenarios for the chess pieces to play out, sorts them, makes patterns with them, personifies them into real kings and queens (or fairies and unicorns), and never EVER puts them away without being prompted. Apparently she also photographs them, since this is what I found on my camera the other day:

I can only imagine what imaginative scenario is being played out here.

With all her time with the chess pieces, Sydney has never expressed an interest in learning, herself, although she's witnessed so many matches that I'd be surprised if she didn't already understand how to play. Her imagination, however, is thoroughly enriched by chess, and I can't imagine a better background to the game.