First time tour of Washington with the Bleodows

Our friends from Texas, the Bleodows, already had a trip planned to DC and since we were moving here they decided to hang at our place. The Friday they were here we went into DC for a hot day of walking and seeing some of the sights. I let Jennifer take a lot of the pictures since I know we will be doing this tour a lot while we live here.  Next time, we vote for a bus tour!!

 On the Metro

 Two peas in a pod.  They got along great during the visit.

 Yes, the found a tree to climb

 WWII memorial

 Cooling off at the memorial

 Taking a break on the way to the Lincoln

 Christian what are you doing?  Being an eagle

 They loved playing in the sprinklers at the Lincoln and got soaked

 We all wanted to take the bus

 Yeah-lunch at 3:30

 Flying plane at the Air and Space

 He has to make the faces

 See your reaction time-Piper was a little slow

 Play in the dirt along the mall

 Metro stop

 on our way home

 Jillie and Piper acted like it was a roller coaster

 Wet at the Lincoln

Reston Zoo

A few people had told me that the Reston Zoo was a really good place to take kids.  They got to feed animals and see some exotic animals.  So this past week we decided to go.  It is in the middle of the neighborhood and about the 80 acres-so not as big as Grandma Chicken's house.  Piper was jealous because some people's backyards backed up to this zoo.  They had many farm animal and we bought some food to feed them.  A longhorn took most of Christian's food and a camel even took Piper's cup the food was in.  They have bird sanctuary just like Fort Worth Zoo but on a much smaller scale, but the birds were flocking to the kids sticks and they loved it.  We ate lunch and took the wagon ride.  The zoo was good, but a little pricey for what we saw.  We saw everything in about 2 hours.  I am sure we might go back again especially for the spider monkeys that Christian loved.  Here are a few pictures:

 Piper's cup in his mouth

 I don't know who child this is, but he wanted a picture with the Boa.  Piper took it not me

He loved the spider monkeys-I think because he is a monkey

Reconnecting

It was so fun today to reconnect with a friend from college, Heather Henson Shepard.  She was a roommate of one of my roommates in college and we were RAs together.  It was fun to share stories about our kids and husbands.  Our friend, Kelly, use to live here and moved to Alabama just a few weeks before I moved  here and is going through a lot that I am and it is just so comforting to hear about someone having some of the same struggles I am in this crazy move.  Our kids met and played together pretty well.  When you have some strong willed children with more strong willed children there will be some a few issues, but in the end they wanted us to stay so I think it was a success. It was fun to talk about people we both knew many years ago and what they are doing now and how we can't believe it.  It was fun to see how we are moms now and how crazy that is.  I am glad we got to reconnect today in our crazy lives.  Here is a picture of our kids:

All the kids-yes, she has 4

 The oldest girls

 The boys

The girls holding little Maggie!

She got a picture of us together, but I didn't.  It has been almost 20 years.

Climbing trees

One of my favorite things growing up was climbing a great tree in our yard.  I would even just climb it and sit up there and watch the neighborhood.  We had many neighborhood contests in that tree and I always won who could go the highest because I was the tiniest.  We have a good size tree in our back and front yard and Christian has climbed them both.  He loves climbing as much as his mommy did.

Fourth of July 2012

Our neighborhood has fireworks on July 3rd and we were excited to get to see them. We even got invited to sit with our neighbors in their secret spot and also one of Brian's co-workers-so we felt loved. The sad thing is a bad thunderstorm blew through about that time and so the only fireworks we got to see were God's. I did introduce Piper to sitting on the front porch and watching the rain. It is one of my favorite memories growing up is sitting on the front porch with the rain coming down and talking with my parents and sometimes just taking in God's beauty of storms. I have always loved storms. So Piper really wanted to see real fireworks and we could not convince her to watch them on TV so we went to a town about 20 minutes from here to watch their fireworks. It was a really good show and we had great seats and one person even commented it was better than the capital fourth. I told Piper she was right that fireworks are better in person!! A fun thing is right after as we were coming home a bad storm came through and we had to drive through it. God was protecting us as it stopped raining by the time we got home and we have a detached garage so we didn't have to go through the rain to get inside with sleepy kids. Here are some fun picture!!

 What do the Mckean's do while waiting for fireworks?  Electronics-Kindle, Phones, and Touches!