Out and about in October

We had a couple of good little trips out and about last month.  Every time we go into the city the girls go with their scooters that Mina bought them so that they can make it around easily and in style :)

 

The first trip of the month was to the Air and Space Museum. Although it was a Sunday afternoon in early October (aka not a time I thought there would be a lot of tourists) it was still really crowded. Despite the throngs of people it was still fun and the girls spent time in the kids area doing experiments and getting into planes.  We watched a demo on the space station (which was perhaps more interesting for me than them, despite the fact it was geared to kids....)

 Izzy really liked the replica of the hubble telescope...

And Evie was most excited about the Apollo 11 lander. There was so much to see we didn't even make it to the Air part.... this time around it was all about Space.

Then the next weekend we made a trek out to the Lincoln Memorial, with a scooter by the White House on the way.

 And a visit to the WWII memorial, which Patrick and I realized we had never gone to before.  I'm afraid we didn't take any pictures of the actual memorial, aside from one of us in front of the column for Arizona...

 

Part of the reason we went out to the Lincoln Memorial was because Evie was studying the Civil War in class and writing a historical fiction story as part of her assignment. So while we were at the memorial she spent some time reading Lincoln's speeches and taking notes, I don't know, however, if any of the material made it into her final story :)

 

The next week Patrick was back in Tucson and the girls were out of school for a day so they came into the city with me and then spent the day at the Alliance Francais. In order to motivate them out of the house early I restorted to a tried and true tactic... the promise of donuts:

Luckliy for me there was a Krispy Kreme right off the Dupont Circle metro stop! Then on Saturday we all drove up to Baltimore to pick Patrick up from the airport and then decided to go to the harbor for dinner, seeing how we were already mostly there.

 

Having had a busy few weeks of commuting back and forth from Tucson Patrick decided to take it easy one Friday and came to visit me for lunch downtown... We went to the USDA farmers market for lunch (one of the last ones of the year) and then he went off to the National Gallery of Art for a bit.

Throughout October we have been excited to see the leaves start to change color... this is a shot from when I walked Evie to school before her big field trip to the Smithsonian Chesapeake Discovery Center. She had a ton of fun in the tidal pools and came home and informed us that she wanted to be a biochemist who studies the ocean because "they just couldn't answer all my questions."

Finally, keeping with our memorial theme, two weekends ago we went to the Jefferson Memorial, which Patrick was pretty sure he had never made it to before. We almost didn't make it ourselves because it was sooo windy and cold. Afterward we uber'ed to waterfront and met a friend of mine from high school who was visiting and another who recently moved to town for a late lunch/early dinner.

Then that night back at home we walked through the annual Garrett Park "spooky woods", which was a lot of fun.  I for one was glad to have a Halloween analog here to our Tucson favorite of Valley of the Moon.  For the spooky woods the local high school students decorate a short trail that everyone then walks (or in Genevieve's case runs) through.

Halloween 2016!

All sorts of other things to catch up on... but first some awesome Halloween (and Halloween related) pics...

This is what they did when I asked them to hug each other....

Patrick volunteered today in both girl's classrooms for the Halloween festivities.

Evie and a few of her friends from class.... (at school)

Evie's 4th grade class...

Evie doing some sort of whipped cream contest...

But before all the festivities.... yesterday we went out to Mt. Airy to have some fun and acquire pumpkins to carve.

There was a "pillow" jumper"

A corn maze...

That had... you guessed it... corn!

There was also large slides (complete with burlap sacs)

Rides so cool even this cool girl loved them :)

This "kid" had some fun on the slides too.

Evie helped her littlest cousin with the goats

And at least a 1/2 hour was spent at the duck races where hand pumps and cut pipes were used to create serious fun!

 Back at home last night we carved our pumpkins... Izzy ended up buying a gourd, which almost needed an electric tool for Patrick to carve it was soooo tough.

Last but not least.... the spooky house... complete with a witch :)

Opera in the Outfield

Last weekend we took a journey into town to the Washington Nationals stadium for the annual Opera in the Outfield event. Mimi had asked Evie to volunteer to help her with the WETA booth and she was more than happy to oblige (especially because there was a free t-shirt involved).  During the "pregame" while Evie helped, Izzy and I checked out the activities for kids.  We tried on opera costumes

Played on the playground (totally brilliant by the way to have a playground within a baseball stadium!) And made paper flowers....

After a bit we were joined by the rest of the Lacroix O'Sullivan crew and Dylan helped to man the booth too.

The main event was, of course, getting to sit on the National outfield and watch a live simulcast of a Kennedy Center opera - The Marriage of Figaro -  on the big jumbo tron. The O'Sullivan Lacroixs and Izzy made it to intermission, which is pretty impressive for the non-reading set because the whole thing was in Italian with subtitles. Evie really wanted to stay, and Vivian was willing to acquire Izzy for the night, so Gen and I stayed to the very end (along with Mimi and John, who being the lucky ducks they are could just walk home.)

All told it was a great time and Evie and I didn't get home until just before midnight.  Patrick, who had been in New Orleans, even beat us home :)

Weekend Happenings

We are trying to take advantage of every weekend in the DC area! And, if I do say so myself, I think we are doing a pretty darn good job so far.

The weekend before school started I took the girls into DC to go to the Natural History Museum. They, once again, scootered to and from the Metro and around the mall and then we stashed the scooters in a locker and spent 3 hours at the museum.  A good 1.5 hours of that was in the Curious (spelled Quer?ios... or something like that) area of the museum where there are all sorts of microscopes set up and hundreds of drawers of natural wonders for people to pull out and investigate.  Both Evie and Izzy were fascinated by the grains of sand from around the world and Evie spent some time with a volunteer learning about gniess and other fancy stuff.  There was also a special exhibit on synthetic biology (which I am pretty sure is another word for genetic engineering... but maybe I am being too skeptical... or is that cynical) where the girls pasted together super heroes with whatever "parts" they thought would be best suited for rescuing a person falling from a building.  Izzy opted for a spiderweb hand and extra long hair and Evie went for extra long arms and extra long hair. Anyway, we all received pretty cool DNA tattoos for our participation, which almost made up for the slight creepiness of it :)

On labor day weekend we spent the weekend proper hanging around the house, or really hanging around outside the house, because it was so lovely.  One consequence of having a very low, see through fence, and a corner lot is that every kid who walks by sees the other kids playing in the yard.  This resulted in, at one point, no less than 10 children at our house dispersed throughout the inside and outside.  (Of course a good five of those 10 are "natives" aka our kids and nephews). Genevieve and Izzy have become particularly fond of our across the street neighbors, Rajni and Abani who are 8 and 5 respectively.  Izzy is exceptionally excited to be joining Abani's same girl scout troop at the end of this month!

Sunday evening we decided to take a walk near our house down to Rock Creek. So very fun to have running water (a creek!) about a mile from home. Dylan was out on a bike ride in the area earlier in the day and took a pit stop to leave a little message for us to find...

On Monday (Labor Day) we decided to venture further from home and drove for about 1/2 hour to Sugarloaf Mountain. Although you could drive almost to the top of the "mountain" it still turned out to be a pretty good little hike to the top for the girls. It met my marker of a good hike... by the end both girls were complaining of being tired but not in tears on the side of the trail because they are so tired (that there my friends is the mark of good parenting... just a little bit, but not too much of kid torture

Then afterwards we all went to a very nearby winery that was having its annual grape stomping festival and... you guessed it... all had the chance to stomp on grapes.  Yep, pretty much a life-long dream realized.  Now it was a contest to see who could stomp the most in 45 seconds, making it more like a fitness exam then a relaxed experience, but very fun nonetheless! (There is a video of all four of us competing, but it is on Patrick's phone so I'll have to upload that later!)

The labor day weekend finished with a bang at the annual dog swim at the local pool.  The dog swim is open to all "member" dogs and is the last hurrah for the pool water before it is drained for the winter.  It was a decidedly fabulous and bizarre experience.  We brought Sadie, but I am afraid it wasn't much fun for her...

Then this weekend, which was decidedly hotter than the weekend before, we headed out to the Chesapeake for a little bit of beach time. The girls played in the sand for a few hours, found a few shark teeth, scooped up river muck to add to their sandcastle (don't worry they bathed afterwards) and generally had a good time. We capped off the afternoon with a walk on the little main street and some ice cream.

Next weekend I think we'll be staying closer to home, but will still aim for adventure!