Fossils and a Picnic on the Mall

Mark and Nathan and I are in Washington DC for a long weekend. We're using Nathan's upcoming 2-year birthday as an excuse to do something special -- give him some stimulating mommy-daddy time before he has to share us for the rest of his life -- but the reality is that we just really really like DC, and wanted a weekend away.

So, yes, I am blogging on vacation. Normally I prefer to avoid being this connected when I am out of town -- just want to be with my family, and away from everything else. (That's why we travel to do vacation, instead of doing it in the den.) But here's the thing about traveling with a toddler: he needs to nap. And here's the thing about traveling with Mark: he likes to nap.

So right now they're both zonked out in our hotel room (yay for huge rooms and full kitchens at Residence Inn where they can nap -- separately -- and I can type and watch tv, all in the same suite!) and Beanie and I are wide awake, enjoying the free internet. So this won't be a long post, but I wanted to share a few pictures from our first day in Washington.

This morning (after a ride on the metro that was exactly as pleasing to Nathan as you'd think... and confusing as well -- as soon as he's on the train, he asks where's the train? where'd it go?) we went to the National Museum of Natural History to check out lots of sea life (polar bears! starfish! black seal! oooooh that's a big whale!) and elephants and lions and dinosaurs. In case you were curious, toddlers (well, Nathan anyway) don't buy into any differences between woolly mammoth skeletons, mastodon skeletons, elephant skeletons, and the like. They're all just "dinosaurs" - about halfway through the museum I convinced him that although they weren't all the same animal, they were indeed all fossils, so that quickly became the word of the morning: 'FOSSIL!"

Then we went to the mall for a picnic lunch. (Which we might or might not have made from the free breakfast options at our hotel this morning. Because we might or might not be that cheap.)

We let Nathan ride the carousel with Mark (in his words: ride the horses) and after he was done he tried to convince us that he needed to go again, even though we told him he already ridden them and was all done. You could see the wheels turning in his head, and then he said ride the horses Mommy, as if one ride with Daddy wasn't enough! (We didn't cave, by the way.... it's one of the few things in DC that's not free.)

Anyway our time there on the mall was great -- it was nice just to relax and let Nathan run around and throw his ball, and have some time as a family, just the three of us. That's why we're here, after all. So maybe traveling with a toddler is actually more relaxing than doing it on our own -- it forces us to do things at a toddler pace and on a toddler schedule. We'll see how that theory plays out.

In the meantime, hi from Washington!