Some good looking boys by the lake

One morning we took some pictures, and I love these of the boys.

 

 

 

 

Van Buren and the return home

When our time was up in Washington DC, we spent a lovely day with some friends in Wilmington, Delaware whom we had not seen in a long time. We really appreciated their hospitality and wish we had more opportunities to spend time with them.

Then we were off to western New York, place of so many of my wonderful childhood summer memories, my parents' roots, and old friends and family. As we arrived after a day of winding across Pennsylvania, I put on Dar William's ode to the region that always hits me just right and captures the essence of the place. It definitely got me in the mood.

We spent a really nice nine days there. Some mornings we played tennis with the kids before heading down to the beach for the afternoon.

 

The fourth of July was a whopper of a day. After church in the morning, the boys got ready for the neighborhood bicycle parade followed by a pancake breakfast.

 

Then we headed to the annual Zaccari reunion for all the descendants of my great great grandparents. A hundred or two people still come every year, and there is a nice familiarity in it. There is a jump house for the kids, and they alternated between jumping and eating desserts for a few hours until they were completely worn out.

 

We headed home where, against all odds, I actually got all kids to take a nap before heading to our third party of the day at the home of an old family friend. They served us some delicious dinner, we got to catch up with old friends, and it concluded with an absolutely extraordinary fireworks show over the lake followed by a bonfire, s'mores and hot dogs. Whew.

My Mom and her sister Lynn together own my grandparents' old cottage on Lake Erie. For a few days both of their families were all at the lake, and it was great to catch up with my cousins. We especially appreciated how generous Lynn was with her motorboat; Joseph and Caleb got to take lots of rides in it and go tubing, and Nephi got to water ski.

 

The lake has some of the loveliest sunsets you could imagine, and this year each night seemed to be amazing. One calm evening we had a stone skipping contest between Joseph, my sister Laura, and my parents. After an impressive showing by my Mom, my Dad managed to edge her out for the win.

 

 

It was especially lovely to have a few days to spend with my amazing and beautiful sister. I loved catching up with her on where she is in her life right now, and where she's going. This summer she's spending a few weeks in Tibet as part of her study of Tibetan medicine.

 

We also got to spend time with my Grandma. I really can't overstate how much we all love her. And she loves us all, and especially the boys, so much.

 

Her Alzheimer's is slowly progressing, although she is still able to function quite well on her own in most respects. But many associations she makes are automatic, and every time we came over she would see the boys and immediately want to make cut out sugar cookies. Once we tried to just bake the break-apart premade cookie dough cookies, and she said we were ruining everything. "I want to see little boys covered in flour!!" she insisted. So we made cookies pretty much every day, and really, what is there to complain about?

We also spent a terrific day with my parents at Midway park, had a nice reunion with my Mom's cousins, and hosted our traditional kids' tea party on the beach. Overall it was one of the nicest years we've spent at Van Buren, and really appreciate all the work my Mom and Lynn put in to make it such a special place.

On our way back to Colorado, we spent a really wonderful two days in Dayton. We got to see a few friends there, had a barbecue with our old neighborhood, enjoyed the amazing playgrounds and parks that are everywhere in that city, and also hit up some of the city's thrift stores in between. I have no idea what magical mix of thrift and wealth cosmically combine in Dayton to make it the thrift store capitol of the universe, but those stores are incredible. I miss our friends in Dayton, but those stores are a close second.

And then it was drive, drive, drive until we arrived back home to discover everything well. And the trip was over. Lots of amazing memories, 4700 miles, no real catastrophes. Success.

Mount Vernon

Towards the end of our time in DC we spent a day at Mount Vernon.

It is a lovely home, and the view of the river is beautiful.

And wow, were those Washingtons bold with their paint colors!!! If they wanted a green dining room, they just went for it. I really loved the colors in one of the smaller parlors. So much, actually, that I told Nephi that those were the colors we were going to paint our bedroom. I'd have taken a picture but we weren't allowed. (I didn't want to push my luck seeing as Isaac had already set of one alarm during the house tour). And the room is actually painted different colors on the official site's virtual tour. Inconvenient, no? But never fear. My mind is like a steel trap when it comes to decorating ideas and color palates. The colors were a sort of dusty bluish color with olive greenish trim. Sounds a little like just enough rope to hang myself, right? It looked really good.

In addition to the mansion, there are plantation buildings you can walk through. The boys spent close to an hour at the blacksmith's shop watching the men work. The blacksmiths really warm up to the kids when the realize they are genuinely interested in what they are doing and not idly passing by like almost everyone else. We spent substantial time watching blacksmiths at Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Mount Vernon. That's got to be approaching somewhere near 100% of all working blacksmiths shops on the east coast, right?


We also liked the museum on the grounds. There were several films and lots of information about Washington and his times. Did you know that Martha was only 4'11"?! George was 6'2". It seems so unfair that he died relatively young; after such a remarkable a life of service, and the whole time just wanting to get back to Mount Vernon and enjoy his home and family. Isaac only set off one more alarm in the museum. We just looked around like we had no idea who had done it and ducked into the next room.

The temple

One Sunday after church we headed to the LDS Temple near Washington DC to walk around the grounds with the boys and spent some time at the visitors center. I love the temple.



We also met some friends from San Diego there, then spent the afternoon with them. It is good to see old friends, especially when they are happy and doing well. Thanks, Sam and Mollie!

National Arboretum

On the advice of a local friend, we spent an afternoon at the National Arboretum. And excellent advice it was!! It is a real gem in the city, and probably the most "off the beaten path" thing we did of note. If I had only two days to spend in DC I probably wouldn't go, but if I had a week, definitely. Especially if the day was a lovely spring or fall day - crisp in the shade, some pleasantly warm sunshine, a light breeze wafting by. Instead, the day we went felt like this:

I think it was actually 100 degrees, and so humid you just wouldn't believe it. But still, we had a good time. The boys checked out the carp and their creepily huge mouths.

One of our favorite parts of the arboretum was the bonsai exhibit. Some of the displays really were amazing - very beautiful and artistic.

In the center of the arboretum are the original Capitol pillars from before it was burned in the War of 1812.

There was a great sensory garden full of herbs and edible plants we were encouraged to taste. I have some ultra sensitivity to mint. I can barely walk by a mint plant without getting all dizzy and lightheaded. Weird, huh? Especially since my sense of smell is usually close to nothing. We also walked a ways through a "fern valley," which was lovely but as far as we could tell was another name for "woods." But I guess it's all native species.

We didn't spend as long as we would have liked because we were all about to melt in the heat; there were lots of other areas we didn't get to explore. But if you're in the area, check it out. It's free, beautiful, and you'll have the place almost to yourself.

Great Falls

There were two coolish days (read: not sweltering) while we were in the DC area and we spent them outside. On one of them we went to Great Falls National Park and really enjoyed ourselves. It was a relaxing break from the city and museums, not to mention very pretty and dramatic. (In an "east of the Mississippi" way, if you get my drift.)

We hiked a bit through the woods and were very excited when the woman in front of us shrieked hysterically because she had spotted this rat snake. We followed it for awhile.

We spent a long time at a little beach down by the river where there were lots of water holes full of tadpoles and mosquito larvae and other captivating critters. The boys explored and I lay on a rock in the sunshine.

This was one of the nicest days on our trip, I think.

We were feeling so happy at the end that we even treated the boys to ice cream at the gift shop before heading home.

The Zoo

We spent two days at the National Zoo. According to our photographic record, the boys primarily climbed on bronze animal statues. I'll just share this one.

It is a nice zoo. The panda was eating bamboo, the big cats weren't all sleeping, and the invertibrate house was awesome. Surprisingly, one of the coolest things about the zoo was a huge foam pizza playground for the kids. I have no pictures, so you'll just have to imagine: olive tunnels. Cheese slides. Giant rolling pepperoni slices. I don't really get the connection between a zoo and a pizza either, but a good time was had by all nonetheless.

Air & Space Museum

I'm going to be straight up with you here, folks. Just get this out in the open right up front. I find air and space museums incredibly boring. I have never in my life seen an airplane or rocket and been genuinely moved by it. It's taken me a long time to just admit that. Maybe it means there is something wrong with me. I'll also just come right out and say that I don't like dogs. I think it means my heart is a little dead, but I've tried and I just can't help it. I know somehow rockets and flight symbolize the human spirit and imagination and yada yada, but I've never felt it. This is especially ironic given how many days of my life I've spent in air and space museums with my boys, reading eight million placards about every single stinking airplane in the place. Everywhere we go, it seems we are haunted by excellent air and space museums. The San Diego Air and Space Museum. The National Air Force Museum in Dayton. So of course, how could we miss the Smithsonian? We went. We suffered. The boys loved it. They studied every rocket and every Apollo launch pattern. I'll admit that the cosmology section was actually pretty cool. I could imagine getting into astrophysics. We didn't see everything, and they wanted to go back another day, and we made excuses until we left the area.



And now there is half a continent between me and possiblity of another day there, and I'll admit I feel pretty good about that.

Ballet at the Kennedy Center

A lovely and surprising night in DC was made possible by my friend Matt. He lives in the area and used to work at the Kennedy Center, and he often has access to tickets to shows for which they need to fill up seats. Happily, he thought of us when he had some ballet tickets to give away, and Joseph and I got to go the ballet after eating some BBQ in Georgetown with Matt and Nephi and the boys. It was very fun to go somewhere a bit fancy with Joseph, who was really taken by the whole experience, and behaved very well. He loved the theater and views of the monuments from the roof of the building. The performance was actually three different ballet companies performing 20-30 minutes each, all in very different styles, so it was a perfect show for Joseph. The first was a very classical ballet, the middle was a Stravinsky piece, and the last was an incredibly fun and energetic hoedown number. We loved it!

Natural History Museum

One of the highlights of our time in DC was the Natural History Museum. We spent an amazing three days there - at Joseph and Caleb's insistence - and still didn't see everything. Pretty much every single exhibit (with the exception of gems) was completely captivating to them. They loved the hall of mammals, the ice age animals, the dinosaurs, the ocean hall, the insect zoo, the comparative anatomy exhibit...

One of the greatest parts, though, was the kids' discovery room. We spent hours there. You could touch everything, and there were all kinds of interesting things to look at through microscopes, or bones of different animals to feel and compare, or skulls of different hominids, or magnifying glasses and binoculors to carry around and look really cute.

Another huge hit was the hall on human origins, where they spent an entire afternoon completely absorbed.

It was pretty amazing to see how fascinated the boys were. Thanks, Smithsonian.

Holocaust Museum

I went to the Holocaust Museum today while Nephi went with the boys back the Natural History Museum. It was, of course, horrifying and sad. Overall it was well done; I thought it hit the right balance between being honest about the horror without being unrelentingly gruesome. It also captured the deep sadness of losing whole communities of people. There was a large hall covered with photographs of people who lived in one community that had existed for 900 years, and it is all gone.
What really struck me, however, was a small monitor that was part of a display about liberating the camps. Apparently near one camp, the liberators forced the people in the neighboring town to walk through the camp and witness what had gone on there. It was so poignant to watch the people in their horror and sadness. Not, of course, that their suffering compares in any way to that of the people in the camps. But I felt like I could relate to them. I felt like watching them, it might be a small part of what judgment will be like one day. Somehow, the truth of everything will be laid bare before our eyes, and the blood and sins of our generation will be evident, and so will our complicity in it, and it will be horrifying, and we will have no hope but to cast ourselves on the grace of God to somehow, miraculously, be free of it. There is a difference between the guards in that camp, who threw in the gas canisters and fired up the ovens and starved and beat the people, and the people in the nearby town who did nothing. But I fear sometimes that there is not as big a difference as one would hope. At least speaking for myself.

There was a floor devoted to many of the people who saved Jews from their death, and they were incredible. I fervently pray God that I would be one of those people.

Memorials

The second day we were in DC, we did the big monument walk. The hotel we were staying at was in Rosslyn, just across the bridge from the Lincoln memorial. It was a hot, hot, hot day. We started at the Lincoln memorial, which is incredible and moving. I'm reading a biography of Lincoln right now, and his courage and principles are so inspiring. It is stunning how close we were to losing our country.

Our clever home teacher back in Colorado told Joseph and Caleb to be sure to get a picture of themselves touching Lincoln's toe. We did the best we could.


We then turned around and admired the view of the Washington monument. It is interesting how it truly towers over the city. We came back another day and got to go to the top.
We walked by the Vietnam War Memorial, which is so moving. It doesn't look that big, but as you walk and walk, and the names of those young kids just keep coming, it does something to you. We also walked through the Korean War Memorial, and just as we got there, the skies opened and there was an incredible, refreshing downpour for about 5 minutes, then it got really hot and steamy. Kind of made you feel like you were in the jungle with the guys.

Then it was around the tidal basin to the FDR and Jefferson memorials. I had never been to the FDR memorial before and like it a lot, as did the boys. Jefferson's memorial fit him well. He's there in the back in this picture if you look closely.

Before we went to the top of the Washington memorial a few days later, we walked down to the WWII memorial, which I also loved. Nephi described it well - a classical monument to the last of the classical wars. It was beautiful and substantial and reverent. The range in styles in the memorials is so impressive, and there's not one that didn't work for me. I really loved seeing them all.

The big landmarks

We made it to Washington DC! The first day we were here we had tickets to go on a tour of the Capitol building, which was a nice, iconic way to start this leg of our trip. The tour wasn't too long, and the boys did a good job and even seemed interested. The dome was impressive.




Later that day we walked briefly through the Library of Congress, which is so beautiful inside! So many interesting things on the ceiling. It would be a great building to go through with a good tour guide someday.


A few days into our time here we made the trek over to see the White House, which isn't especially close to other things we had been seeing (or a Metro stop, for that matter). Due to changes in our schedule after we requested the tour tickets (which you have to do months in advance and provide all kinds of personal information like social security numbers) we didn't get to go on the official White House tour, but we're not too sad about it. We went through the Visitors Center, which is really boring if you're not totally fascinated by the interior decorating choices of various first ladies, then got the picture of the boys in front. Which is what we were really after all along.

They got soaking wet in the sprinklers on the lawn, which helped cool them off and made it a bit more fun.

DC Itinerary

In response to your various queries about what we've seen so far and what we're planning to see, I offer the following itinerary. Like all of you, I look forward to reading Gina's impressions and analysis. But until then, this seems like a serviceable placeholder.

Jun 12 - Tour of the Capitol, Library of Congress (The Founding Fathers very much looked to the Classical Ideals - the Renaissance revival of Greek and Roman ideas for their inspiration.), National Museum of the American Indian

Jun 13 - Memorials Walk: Arlington Cemetery, Memorial Bridge, Lincoln, Vietnam War, Korean War, Franklin Roosevelt, Jefferson (Deeply moving and spiritual; also a long walk.)

Jun 14 - Air and Space Museum (The boys liked all of it. My takeaway: Cosmology is cool!)

Jun 15 - National Zoo (Saw the giant pandas. Only made it halfway.), Marines' Iwo Jima memorial parade (Hard not to whistle to Colonel Bogey.)

Jun 16 - Natural History Museum (We only made it through part of the 1st floor; the boys study every single exhibit very closely.), Kennedy Center ballet (Gina and Joseph's special date.)

Jun 17 - Great Falls (A nice break from the city. We observed tadpoles and mosquito larvae at the edge of the Mather Gorge in the beautiful weather.)

Jun 18 - Natural History Museum part 2 (The boys intense curiosity and scrutiny continue; we still haven't seen everything.)

Jun 19 - White House (Glad I'm not the one making the interior decorating decisions. That seems more overwhelming than being leader of the free world.)

Jun 20 - Washington Temple Visitor's Center and Grounds (I love to see the boys' enthusiasm for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.)

Jun 21 - National Zoo part 2 (Almost finished it off. Enjoyed the Invertebrates, Amazonia, and the Giant Pizza (?) )

Jun 22 - National Arboretum (Another oasis of tranquility from the hubbub of the city.)

Jun 23 - Huntley Meadows Park (Amazing wetland just minutes from strip malls)

Jun 24 - World War II Memorial, Washington Monument, Holocaust Museum (Gina), Natural History Museum part 3 (Nephi and the boys)

Jun 25 - Mount Vernon

That's what we've been up to. As you can see, I couldn't resist some pithy commentary of my own.
To the boys delight, we've taken the Metro around to most of the sights. Escalators! Trains! Bars to hang on!
Also you should know that this is only what we do during the day; at night we've reconnected with a lot of old friends, many of whom have generously fed, sheltered, and conversed with us.

Wright Brothers' Memorial

Practically across the street from our hotel was the Wright Brothers Memorial, famous site of the first powered flight. We all enjoyed it a lot more than we expected, I think. It was really interesting to learn how focused, systematic, and determined the brothers were in solving the problem of flight. They were like the archetypal scientists, with a really important and interesting, yet solvable, question sitting right before them. The glider they brought down one year to test was a total disaster and would barely fly at all. They were of course discouraged, but went home to figure things out. They realized the data they had been using was really unreliable, so they built their own wind tunnel and carefully tested some 120 wing profiles. The glider they built the next year based on their data worked like a dream, and they had essentially solved the problem of flight and only needed to power their glider. Isn't that a tidy story? That year they went back home and wrote to every automobile engine company with the specifications of the engine they needed. Every single one said it wasn't possible to build. So they and the machinist in their bicycle shop designed and built it themselves, exceeding their power requirements. Isn't that a nice detail? They brought the plane back down from Dayton the next year and flew. It's hard to imagine how thrilling it must have been. Here's the very spot where it happened, with four markers indicating the length of the first four flights.

And a little re-creation.


There was a nice ranger talk that kept the kids' attention, and then kites to fly.


We then walked around the monument erected on the hill where the tested their gliders. Apparently the whole place used to be just sand, like Jockey's Ridge. They apparently chose it because it was one of the windiest places in the country and offered soft landings.

I was really impressed by what the brothers had done by the end of the morning.