King Family Vacation

After camping with family over the Memorial Day Weekend, we planned to continue camping for several days. Our plans changed when the weather looked as if it may rain for several of those days. In last minute decision, we took PopPop up on his offer and headed to Md. We were already half way there and there was lots of things to do close by. It turned out to be a great choice.
On Tuesday, we took the boys to Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. We decided to take the metro instead of dealing with the traffic. We even took a small detour, stopping for lunch at the Chinatown metro stop. We found a great little Chinese place after exiting the station. There was a nice chinese lady making dumplings in the window and we decided it was a good choice. The boys love Chinese food.

At the Natural History Museum, we headed for the dinosuars. Brett was very interested in the fossils. It was great to see them on a large scale. The T-Rex was very exciting. Breandan was little confused why the other animals weren't moving in the displays. He didn't understand why the zebra was just standing there in the Africa display. I quess he was expecting the zoo.

We had a great time exploring the Butterfly room. It is this great room with over 300 live Butterflies flying around. I think the boys could have stay in the room (which was 95 degrees and very humid) for over an hour. They were intent having the butterflies land on them. Brett must taste better to butterflies then Breandan, he was more succesful at having the butterflies land on him. We kept telling Breandan he had to be quiet and still (which for Breandan is very difficult). At one point, he had butterfly land on his head and Brett rushed over to give him a congratatorly hug. Breandan didn't believe though because he couldn't see it. Finally, a nice staff worker helped by placing a butterfly on Breandan hand.

We also saw the new Night at the Museum-Battle of the Smithsonian movie on the IMAX screen. It was great to see it at the actual movie. It espically fun to see things we had seen earlier in the day and to show Brett the Smithsonian Castle, which was key location in the movie. Of course, the big hit of the movie for the boys was the screen with Darth Vader and Oscar.

On Wednesday, we surprised Mimi with a visit. We were very excited to see her new apartment. We are happy she lives so close to MomMom now. Brett and Breandan had lots of fun playing with gracie's toys.

After visiting Mimi, we took the boys to see their first Oriole game. MomMom even took a day off work to go with us. It was a great game. Breandan asked about meeting the mascot, the Oriole Bird. Amazingly, we ran into the Bird before we even found our seats. We sat in the All You Can Eat Seats and ate lots of hot dogs, learned how to eat peanuts from the shell, drank soda, ate popcorn and nachos, and some italian ice. The game went into extra innings and saw the Orioles win with a big 3 run home run in the battle of the 12th. I hope this was the first of many Oriole games for us.