Week 8 -Washington, DC (The Nation's Capital)

Hello Family and Friends,

We have Brett back. He is feeling much better just in time for the big city.

The family on a bus tour in Washington, DC. Brett refused to acknowledge that we were taking a picture.

We started our DC trip on Theodore Roosevelt Island. He's the president responsible for establishing the National Parks and the National Park Service. We then continued with some more capital touristy things like a bus tour of DC. We saw the US Capitol, Jefferson Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument and a plethora of Smithsonians. I told Brett that you could visit a different site in DC every weekend for the rest of your life and still not see everything. It is completely overwhelming to try to see in one trip. At the same time it is very exciting to think of living here and taking it all in a little at a time.

The day we arrived at our hotel happened to fall in line with Holi, a Hindu spring festival of colors celebrating love and equality. There was an event right outside of our hotel which was really neat to see. It brought a lot of excitement to the beginning of our time in DC.

Holi festival in front of our hotel

Atlas decided to add a little more excitement to our trip by getting his thumb slammed into the spring loaded door of the hotel. We took his first (and hopefully only!) trip to the ER, where all the staff had never seen an injury like his. The ER doctor told us the amount of force it would take to rip his nail off in this way is so much that typically pain would prevent him from doing this. However, Atlas is a determined little boy. He was in such a good mood all the way to the ER as long as we didn't touch his thumb. Once the doctor numbed his thumb, which he did not like at all, he slept through the entire procedure of cutting the rest of his nail off. The PA told us that he would probably sleep the rest of the day with the drowsy medicine they had given him. Of course he did not and was up till like midnight without missing a beat. No, we didn't want to spend 5 hours at the ER, but we are so thankful that we all got to go home and that Atlas is a total champion.

Atlas just doing Atlas things in his very large thumb brace.

We have also been enjoying some of the cherry blossom festivities. The whole city has been touched with cherry blossoms. Our favorite has definitely been the Taiko drums.

On of the metro cars decorated for the cherry blossom

Taiko style drumming by a group out of Virginia

As far as our mission to find a home, we are still on the search. DC has a lot of very highly rated elementary schools. We have only looked at schools that are rated 8/10 or higher and there are twenty-three. This week we have looked at five schools (maybe we are having too much fun being tourist in DC).