Air and Space

I'm on a blog-roll! Ivan took Sam to see the White House, but I stayed "home" so that Eric could get another nap. Eric is the type of child who loves his sleep, and he gets really giggly when he's overtired. If I don't take a cue, the next step is yelling at me (I'm serious--the only time he's ever cried is when he had an ear infection, but he does yell if he's not being understood and responded to.) I tried to post a video here showing Eric laughing his head off as Sam flew his new toy airplanes up and down, but I couldn't get it to upload. Probably too big. Anyway ...

On Sunday night, we went to the Air and Space museum. We went back on Monday. One thing that I love about DC with toddlers is that everything is free. Toddlers have such a short attention span, that if you're paying $10-$20 to get into an attraction, you really can't get your money's worth. But with these things, we can go, stay for 30 to 60 minutes, and leave and come back again, over and over and over.

The Air and Space museum is such a magical place, especially for a little boy. Sam was in awe and kept running around looking at all the airplanes. He loves Little Einsteins and quickly found a cylinder-shaped red "Rocket." Then he found an old DC-9 that you can go in and decided that was his favorite. We must have gone in that one 10 times. Here is a picture of him outside his airplane.


On Monday after we exhausted our attention spans (I think Sam could have spent another hour going in and out of that airplane, but Eric and I were bored to death), we went down to the food court in the Air and Space museum to get some lunch. Sam was dying for chicken nuggets and "fronch" fries. It was run by no other than McDonalds, and this McDonalds seems more like an extension of the national museum dedicated to innovation and technology. No matter how you feel about the quality of the food (ick!), McDonalds is synonymous with American cuisine, and this McDonalds was the most efficient restaurant. There must have been over 100 people in front of us in 10 lines (enough to almost make me walk out since I had two cranky kids, but since one was set on his chicken nuggets, I stayed.) We had our food and were sitting down in 5 minutes. In addition to 20 cashiers, they had 20 serving stations. So you paid, and by the time you out away your wallet and took five steps back, there was someone waiting with your food. Then there were these mountainous drink fountains and tons of spickets with ketchup and all the other condiments. Sam was happy, and even got a special little space ship with his happy meal.