A Pit Stop in Richmond—Treadgear

We only spent an hour in Richmond so I really shouldn't have very much to say about it. At any rate it should take me less than an hour to finish this post, right? It would be ridiculous to take longer to record our time in Richmond than the time we actually spent there, right? This post shouldn't be too long. I hope.

We stopped at Treadgear Iron Works, which is now a national monument it once was the main producer of weaponry and ammunition for the Confederate States. The inside of the museum was kind of lame (in all fairness we'd gone to the Museum of the Marine Corps just hours earlier so our expectations were high) so we eventually abandoned the museum in favour of the great outdoors.

Fort Ward and Quantico

We decided to break up our ride home into palatable chunks, stopping for adventures all along the way in order to keep the kids from losing it in the backseat. Andrew had originally wanted to go back into DC to see a few more things but Blake and Amanda helped me convince overly-optimistic Andrew that doing so would be insane. Weekend traffic in DC is pretty light. Weekday traffic, on the other hand, is not. Instead we drove just down the street to see the Fort Ward park, our very first Civil War site.

It was such a nice day—we were so hot we were peeling off sweaters. This made me very happy. I prefer sunshine to snow any day of the year (including Christmas).

Snippets from our time with Amanda

Another reason we chose this past weekend to visit the DC area was to attend our friend Amanda's wedding (p)reception. She brought a boy home to Utah this past summer and we were lucky enough to meet him. I saw her sister a little while later and asked if this trip was the trip—the "meet the family" trip. Emily told me that it most certainly was a trip like that and hinted that a special panda-shaped box had been covertly delivered into Blake's hands so that he could put something sparkly inside to give to Amanda, who has a thing for pandas.

So I wasn't too surprised to hear a little while later that Amanda and Blake were officially engaged.

We stayed at their apartment, where Amanda is living solo until their wedding later this month, while we were in Virginia. Their (p)reception was on Friday, which is why we had to rush to hit the road after Rachel's pow-wow. We arrived just in time for it to start and were pleasantly surprised with how many little friends there for the girls to play with. It was at Amand's bishop's house; he's a former congressman (and Andrew was rather excited about that).

Amanda and Blake's reception was really fun. I was impressed that they planned and put on the whole thing by themselves and it turned out great. I'm sure they're happy to have family helping out with their other receptions—in Utah and Arizona—later this month!

They had a little barbeque upstairs and had games to play downstairs, which is where most of the little kids were hanging out.

Rachel had insisted on wearing her pow-wow garb to the party which I almost felt a little embarrassed about since the reception was in such a fancy home. Downstairs she found a little firefighter to play air hockey with, though, so I stopped feeling embarrassed and felt awesome instead. She was rocking her end of the air hockey table in her fringed pillowcase dress and beaded necklace (we left the headdress in the van); he was trying to best her in his rubber boots and plastic firefighter coat. Andrew saw them and said, "What is this—The Village People?"

I'm not sure the Village People ever had a firefighter costume but it was still a funny joke that our kids aren't cool enough to appreciate yet.

When Amanda came to stay with us in Egypt she told us about a Tauntaun sleeping bag she'd won online. When we came to stay with her in DC she pulled it out for Rachel to sleep in. Originally she suggested the girls could take turns sleeping in it but when Miriam saw it she didn't want to sleep in it, or share a bed with it, or even be in the same room as it. We convinced her to stay in the room, though she made a "princess bed" on the floor even though the futon was plenty big enough for the girls to share. That Tauntaun was too scary for her.

That made Rachel happy because it meant she got to sleep in it every night!

A day in the district

Getting five people ready for the day is difficult; it's a wonder we ever make it out the door with our whole troupe looking decent. By the time we made it into The District it was past eleven o'clock! I was shocked when I asked Andrew the time—Miriam had woken me up at seven o'clock that morning and we'd been bustling about feeding babies, feeding children, dressing babies, dressing children, packing diaper bags, finding shoes for ten feet, folding up a hide-a-bed, making sure everyone was well pottied ever since. It hardly seemed possible that all we'd managed to do was get out the door and take a short ride on the metro by eleven in the morning!

In our defense, we were rather tired from listening to a wild party until the wee hours of the morning. One particular attendee at the party was rather sad and rather drunk and/or high and I suppose a friend was trying to console him when he wailed into the night, "Why me, man? Why me?!" There was much sobbing and incomprehensible mumble-wailing (and loud obnoxious music).

Andrew and I giggled and dubbed him Sad Drunk Man. We couldn't stop laughing; I'm sure the man was hurting but it was such a cliche thing to call out (and we were up past any reasonable hour and probably would have laughed at anything).

Getting ready

Here are a few pictures of us getting ready to go to on our trip...

On Thursday Andrew was taking an important call in the office/bedroom/nursery but Benjamin was ready to go down for a nap...so he slept on the bottom bunk (where Miriam usually sleeps). Miriam thought it was hilarious.