American History Museum and the Mall

On Monday, the girls and I ventured out to go see the American History Museum and walked down the mall to see the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial.  It as a decently beautiful day so it was perfect to walk around.

Allie saw this suit of armor and said, "Hey, it's like Little Einstiens!" 

At the end of the day, Allie said that the violins were her favorite part of the day.  Little did she know these were worth millions, she must have great taste!  She really is such a lover of music, singing all day long and pretending different items are musical instruments.  

This is the doll house, but I really just wanted to post a picture of her cute new haircut that I cut right before we left.  I think it is super cute and makes her hair have a style and less stringy.  Her first real chop of her hair.

We also loved the trains in the basement and since it was a weekday, it was pretty empty so the girls just played and crawled around down in transportation for a while.

It is amazing this did not end in disaster since Allie only has 10 lbs on Hadley.  

This is to document that I actually was there, and didn't let the girls run wild without me. :)

It is a bummer that the Washington Monument is still closed from the earthquake, so this is as close as we could get.  I guess the benefit is that there weren't any lines?

At this point in the day, Hadley had fallen asleep in the stroller so we took our time and let Allie play around by the new WWII memorial.  The last time I was in DC was in high school so it had been almost 9 years since I had seen everything.  

One difference I noticed was how much longer the walk felt from the monuments to the Lincoln Memorial. I guess pushing around a double stroller with your whole life in the bottom gets a little heavy.  Allie loved taking a picture by the statue mostly because that was what everyone else was doing and she wanted to be cool too!

This was along the Potomac side, but sadly, we did not get to spit in the Potomac per Shaw tradition.  Maybe next time.

It was at this point that Hadley woke up from her 2+ hour stroller nap and we made our way over to find Mike and headed back to the Smithsonians for another hour.