Air and Space museum

I LOVE long weekends. They used to be four day weekends, but here they are usually three day. I don't mind though. The perfect long weekend looks like this: Saturday - get things done around the house, grocery shop, etc. Sunday - go to church and enjoy being home together as a family. Monday - go do something crazy fun! On normal weekends, I like to both get things done and do something fun on Saturdays, but realistically, that doesn't always happen, hence the love for long weekends. :)

We looked into a lot of fun places to take the kids on President's Day. We could have gone to the aquarium since we have a membership, but parking is expensive, we've done it a few times already, and it's not nearly as cool as we hoped it would be (like Monterey.) There are a lot of outdoor things we want to do but we'd like to wait for spring or summer to do those. A lot of cool children's museums and other places were closed on Mondays. Eventually, we decided we'd go down to DC to one of the Smithsonian museums. It's so amazing we have all of these awesome museums like art, natural history, air and space, different ethnic groups, historical, etc that are all FREE! We decided the kids would have fun at the air and space museum. I'd been there many years earlier, but no one else in my family had been.

We had a great time together as a family. I really think the kids would have fun pretty much anywhere we go. It's not like they pay that much attention to the displays. They are just happy to run around and explore somewhere new and different. We started in the kid section where there are lots of hands on things and teach different principles of physics. I was curious to learn about some of them, but the kids kind of push us through too quickly. With all the cool displays and educational things both historic and scientific, my dad could probably spend a week in that place (minus the pushy kids. ;))

Claire piloting a Cessna. It reminded me of my dad as I used to ride in this kind of plane with him flying. :)

Let's run and play!

I'm pretty sure I overheard a tour guide say that more lives were lost creating these missiles than using them. I'm not sure what exactly they are or why that was the case, but I thought it was interesting. It was fun to learn something since I couldn't read much. :)

Cool space stuff!

This crazy one LOVED the freedom to run around with Claire. She is getting much better at not running away from us too, so we allowed her that freedom. 

There were lots of things for the kids to touch and buttons to press. They didn't know what it did, but it didn't matter. There were also some airplanes and rockets to go in and explore. Cool!

Randomly, we actually ran into good friends from church while we were there. They last minute also decided to go there and despite the museum being HUGE, they happened to bump into us. Claire was in heaven as one of her best friends is in their family. We had fun walking around with them for a bit before we headed home. The kids had a nice nap on the ride home while Chris and I enjoyed peaceful conversation. What a great day!