DC: Day 1

My favorite travel tip is to let your kids guide your trip. Our trips are almost completely kid-centric, and that's okay! We started out on Saturday morning at the Museum of Natural History. On the way there, we stopped to get a quick glimpse of the Capitol.

And then it was on to see the dinosaurs! This is a T-Rex skull, which Will loved.
Henry's favorite dinosaur is a stegosaurus. Can you see it behind us?

If you look closely in this picture, you can see a skeleton within a skeleton on the wall. It was so cool! The big fish ate the little fish and then died and was preserved.

I got to take a quick look at the Hope diamond before we moved on to more bones. Here you can compare your height to that of an elephant's leg.

And we saw skeletons of more animals. The museum looks pretty empty in this picture, but it was crazy-crowded, even at 10 am when they opened. We just beat the crowds to this gallery.

The next stop was at the Insect Zoo at the museum. My boys love bugs, of course, so this was fun for everyone. Henry was obsessed with the honeybees. He stood at this exhibit for 20 minutes, watching the bees crawl in and out of the tube, and then we had to pull him away screaming. The funny thing is that the Houston Museum of Natural Science has this exact same exhibit, and he's never cared one way or the other about it before Saturday!

After a quick lunch at the museum, we walked back to our hotel for afternoon naps. Then we boarded a double-decker bus to see some more of the city's sights. The bus was one of Will's favorite things about our trip, probably because he didn't have to walk!

The bus picked us up right outside our hotel.

And it took us by the Capitol, monuments, and museums.

We saw the White House.

Will did not want his picture taken and really didn't care too much about the White House.

But everyone liked the water fountain and ducks nearby.

We even shared our goldfish with them.

The boys were tired and spent quite a bit of time just like this. Despite walking all over the city with boys in our arms or on our shoulders, Gene and I managed to summon enough energy for a nice dinner out at Ris. We got a sitter for the boys and celebrated my birthday, just the two of us. It was the perfect end to our perfect first day in DC.