Saturday - Air and Space Museum

June 22, 2013

This morning was the big outing to the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum overflow site at Dulles airport.  I was not expecting it to be so big, and so well put together - for an overflow site!  It turned out to be really excellent.  Pay for parking, but not for entry, which is amazing too!  Art and I went with our boys, Paul's boys, and Opa, in two cars.  We saw many wonderful things.  All the kids were in great humor and behavior.  A bit of a meltdown for Wyatt at one point by the bathrooms, and Yannick struggling near the end.

Some of what we saw:

A view of the entire hangar

Oh yes, we made each kid have a buddy.  Here are cousin best buds Andrew and Wyatt as buddies.  Matching even!

Counts grandsons (minus Eli) with the astronaut suit.  I will need to frame this picture!

John with an impromptu buddy in Nick

Very cool fighter jet that Z and W know from their jet cards.  A Harrier Jump Jet?  A Strike Eagle?  I don't remember...but they would!

Very cool car plane.  Fly it to an airport, take it apart, and drive it to the office.  Love this!

Still, after 7 years, my arch-nemisis.  :)

So cool cousins, hanging around, watching a video, eating, animal crackers secretly.

My favorite - the Space Shuttle!

And the little Nick with this helicopter, as requested by him. 

Then we went to go up the control tower to look out the windows, and then to listen to the air traffic controls.  Then finally, off to Chick fil a for lunch.  Poor Z.  His least favorite place.  He even managed to drop some of his dreaded nuggets on the floor, then was crushed, having thought he would get out of eating them, a CFA employee brought him a new box of them.  Luckily for him, Ben was still hungry, and the nuggets got shared around...except for the one to replace the dropped one. :)

Once everyone was fed and happy it was time to go back to the house for rest time, and of course more swimming!  

We also got a picture of Oom Karl with his "wants to shock Oma" beard, stage 1.

Tomorrow we get stage 2.

Tonight, since Karl/Laura and Thomas were all here with the rest of us, we had a split "girls" / "guys" night.  I took BOTH Zachary, and now Wyatt over to Paul/Railey's to have a sleepover with the cousins.  Wyatt was a bit of a surprise actually.  We were not expecting him to be comfortable spending the night in a different house from us.  But he was insistent, and so of course we let him.  They both remember sharing a room with all of the PCounts boys last year at family day.  Nick of course also wanted to go, but we vetoed that.  Wyatt was even outwardly ok with their dogs, and big up a brave front about liking dogs.

Once genders were separated, the ladies all watched Soul Surfer.  We started it last year during family day, but little Yannick had one of his screaming episodes, and I had to bail, and the others had a hard time hearing.  It is a good movie!  I'm glad that Mia wanted to watch it again.  However, we did not make it to the end bf some started dozing off.  We left off with about 20 minutes left, so we left that for another night.  I did my sit-ups (can't let weeks of "booty bootcamp" go to waste!) and was asleep instantly after that.  No idea what time Art made it back to bed.