A Weekend in D.C. and Snow to Follow

(Kate living it up in D.C.)

Okay, so in fear that the Fortune Family Blog would die forever if left to me writing the entries, Shelly has taken over blogging. For most of you, besides my mother, this is probably a welcomed change, less pointless rambling and more pictures of the family, but I'm am writing this entry, so here you go.

We spent this last weekend in D.C. and experienced the typical " young and frustrated parents carting around two young children in a big city." Let me say the weather did not cooperate this weekend. It was not horrible, but it was cold, and for someone who forgot their coat, it was real cold. Shelly did bring my skull cap and scarf, so I walked around all weekend with my head bundled up and the rest of my body exposed, receiving some strange looks from people who must of thought, "why is that idiot carting his kids around in this cold and not even have a coat on himself?"


(Shelly and the girls at the Air & space museum)

First, everyone who ever visits D.C. should support the Smithsonian organization, for all of their museums are free. Not paying through the nose for museums makes our weekend in D.C. a little more bearable, even at a psychological level. We originally intended to visit the National Zoo, but the weather nixed that idea, and we settled on visiting the Natural History Museum on Saturday, and the Air & Space museum on Sunday. Personally, I love the Air & Space museum, and every time I visit it I remember the first time my grandmother took me to D.C. I fell in love with the Air & Space museum then, and it has stayed with me even today. Madison also enjoyed the Air & Space museum. By the end of the day, she knew the four forces of flight and how funny it must be living on the space station.

(This is the Grand Masonic Washington Memorial, which sits on a hill overlooking Alexandria)

(Madison and I missed the tour of the temple, but I did get a pic of her from its steps. Next time we are definitely taking the tour and going to the top.)

We also thoroughly enjoyed the Natural History museum. Its enormous size allowed us only to see a fraction of the museum, but we did visit the butterfly exhibit, which alone made the trip. The butterfly exhibit constitutes a small, fiberglass domed room, where thousands of butterflies live. I want to preface this story by describing both Madison's and Kate's fascination with butterflies. This started with Tom giving us some hand painted butterflies to put above Madison's crib. One of M's first words was "butterfly". Today, both Kate and M have butterflies above their beds. This explains why when we walked into the Butterfly Biosphere, Kate immediately recognized the beautiful paint spots fluttering all around her. In her excitement she could could do little more than squeal, "bubafy, buba, buba," kicking her legs, and pointing at all the butterflies floating around her.




All in all, we had a great weekend.

Wherever we live lately, wee seem to experience a major snow at least once.)

On a completely separate note, we got the brunt of the East Coast snow storm. The heavens dumped approximately eleven inches of snow on Southern Maryland. I wanted to take M sledding, but this area is pretty flat, and I spent most of the morning shoveling our driveway. I will say that I had to go out and buy a new snow shovel. Our trusty Subaru was made for the snow and I drove around town easily. At least until I tried to pull back into our driveway and hit the hidden snow bank created by the plows in the midst of last night's snow storm. The Subaru was stranded like a beached whale, and I spent the rest of the morning shoveling it and our driveway out. I was also impressed with what was open. Of course, I did not go to work with the neighborhood snowed in and the car stuck on top of a snowbank. The base did not even open until noon, and my boss said not to worry about coming in that afternoon -very few people actually made it in at all. Though the government closed down, the grocery store, hardware store, and Starbucks were all opened manned by young high school kids whose bosses undoubtedly persueded them to spend their day out of school at their part time job. The girl at the hardware store said that two managers did not come in, but her boss picked her up in his truck to man the store for the day.

(One day after the storm. The plows finally came through and it warmed up enough for the salt to melt some of the snow.)