Air and Space Museum- Henry.

After the Botanical Garden, we braved the elements again to head over to the Air and Space Museum. HOW HAVE WE NEVER BEEN HERE BEFORE?

It was so cool! We got to see all of the space things that we read about in my books at home. I even got to touch a rock from the moon! We don't have many pictures because June found a 747 she could walk into and spent a good 40 minutes inside of it while Papa, Georgie and I visited the rest of the museum.

We saw an entire room of WWII fighter planes. I'm just now starting to understand about guns and noticed there were guns on the planes. So I asked mama why planes would want to fight each other. She said they were at war because in this case, Germany tried to take away land and homes that belonged to other people, so Britain had to fight back. (A small part of it, we know, but mama hopes it's enough for now.)

Mama made us go back to the lunar landing modules 3 times. This was definitely her favorite part.

Just think- 51 years ago, we managed to get to the moon and back using computers that were bigger than our house and had less power than our laptop and landed there in a module that looks like something a bunch of 7th graders glued together! Incredible. It just makes us sad at what we could be capable of today if the space program had any money at all.

Mama made a bad mistake of suggesting that I be allowed to buy a souvenir in the gift shop with my birthday money. Bad idea. My limit was ten dollars, which excludes most things at the Smithsonian. So I found the biggest thing I could find for under $10- a really flimsy plastic space shuttle. Mama and papa went back and forth over whether they should let me buy it. (the thing would honestly be broken in less than a week.) Luckily, we found a small pull-back plane with working propellers that was much nicer and even cost less. Mama really wants to teach me about saving and spending money and buying nice things and not just garbage, but she admits I might be a little too young.

We had some time left before the museums closed, so we walked across the mall to the Natural History Museum. On the way, we walked through the sculpture garden and found a skating rink! I watched for a good long time, but declared I would "never, ever want to go ice skating."

I don't think June wants to go either.

What a bunch of tree huggers.

We always love to go to the Natural History Museum to visit the dinosaurs. Unfortunately for Junie, the only thing she saw was the back of her eyelids.

While both girls slept, mama and I had our third life lesson of the day. It seemed like the only exhibits I was interested in were the ones about death. I found one where prehistoric humans were burying a human that had died and had a million questions about that. "Why is he in a hole?" "Why isn't he wearing any clothes?" "Why is he all tied up?"

But I really became interested when we walked through an exhibit on Africa and found a coffin shaped like an airplane. My main concern was why someone would want to bury something that looked so cool. Would it fly the body away somewhere? If they bury it, would it come back up when it rained? Mama did her best to answer my questions.

Mama was impressed by this carol reef made entirely of YARN!

Aunt Jenni, do you think you could make me one of these?

We got back to the Metro at rush hour, but finally made it back to our stop. It was past 6 pm by then and the temperatures had really dropped. We had to walk 6 blocks uphill and into the wind. There was much crying, but mama assured us we'd live and made us keep going. And to reward our long cold day, we had pizza and watched the Grinch when we got back home.