How To Torture Your Children

Yesterday, a portion of our blog was dedicated to Romney’s public transportation prowess. This morning while walking to the metro, he bragged about how quick he was getting there and how he knew how to get on all the trains. Today, he not only talked the talk, he walked the walk—or more appropriately—read the newspaper. He looked like a true commuter as he picked up and started reading the days news as we traveled. As we exited he asked Bill why the Redskins still didn’t have a kicker and could he please pick up his own copy of the paper to take with him for the day. I may have a city boy!


We had contacted Senator Hatch’s office before the trip to set up a tour of the Capitol Building and had our time slot this morning. If I don’t vote for Hatch, (who has been in office ENTIRELY TOO LONG, in my opinion), yet have to endure him as a state senator, he (or his poor intern) may as well get me tickets to whatever it is my family is interested in doing while in this town. The unforeseen problem to this plan: half of the family had a total disinterest in seeing the capitol . I will also admit, this was not the highlight of my trip. The kids were bored and restless, the tour guide was impossible to hear above the other 5 tour guides (with groups of at least 30-40 people) in the room with them.


We snuck away from our tour group and kind of had our own little tour of the old senate chambers and the old representative chambers. Pulling away from the group was advised against at the beginning of the tour, so William –our favorite rule follower- was very distressed by the fact that we left. I don’t know any fun factoids because we did this more or less on our own (as alone as you can get with that many people roaming the commonly toured areas with out wandering too far and ending up arrested), but I did actually see objects other than the person in front of me ‘s head. We hit the gift shop in the Capitol and were all surprised when Romney had to have a copy of the Declaration of Independence. We made him wait the length of the tour to really think about it, but at the end of the tour, he was totally convinced and bought himself a copy. He had Bill read it to him at our second stop on our “trail of children’s tears.” After the Capitol visit we headed across the street to do a walk-by the Supreme Court building then headed to the National Archives for another go-round at getting into see the Declaration of Independence. The fact that it was still a 45 minute wait and we were a group of hungry kids and adults, we changed course and stopped at the National Gallery of Art for lunch at the café and some art viewing in the air conditioning. The kids were so not having this. They complained about looking at every single work. When I pointed out it could be worse, they could be outside in the scorching heat waiting in line, they said they would rather be doing that than looking at paintings. Disappointingly, I was able to only make it through the modern collection before being led back into the heat.

Our last stop of the day was in the 45 minute line at the National Archives. Luckily, the line seemed to move quite quickly and it was only outside for about 10 minutes. We did make it in to see (on our third line attempt) the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The kids actually really enjoyed some of the archive exhibits, which were very interactive. This surprised Bill and I. We thought for sure the kids would want to rush back to the hotel, the place they had been begging us to take them to since noon, but they took their time and enjoyed the information. We had a nice evening back at the hotel eating dinner in and watching a movie, building William’s model airplane souvenir and playing some games. I think our D.C. fun may be winding down just in the nick of time.