July 17th

July 17th, 2010

Today was a busy day. We got going kind of late, and stopped for breakfast on our way down to the Mall. While on the mall we went to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian Naitonal Museum of American History. Our tours of these museums were brief and focused just on the items of interest to kids... big dinosaur bones, bugs, stuffed elephants, whales, kermit the frog, trains, the star spangled banner, lincoln's top hat, the ruby slippers, etc. We figure we will come back to DC again at some point when the kids are older and then we will force them to go through all the other parts of the musuems! :)

After our short museum stint we rushed over to Tammy Baldwin's office, our local representative. One of her interns gave us a tour of the capitol building. It was fun going throug the tunnels to get from the office building to the capitol building (and it gave Nicholas a chance to take a short nap in someones -very tired- arms). It was also impressive to see the rotunda and all of the statues. We had tickets to go see the House of Representatives in session, but the kids were totally and completely at the end of their ropes, so we opted out. We could go back and use them tomorrow, but it is unlikely that they will be in session because they often take Friday's off.

After our tour we found ourselves some dinner, and then made our way to the Washington Monument for our trip to the top. We really enjoyed seeing Washington from the top of the Monument. It is a great view of the city. It is too bad they don't do the walk down tours anymore, it would be cool to see all of the commemorative blocks that line the inside of the monument!

Tomorrow we have more tours and more museum fun... lets hope our energy doesn't run out!