Happy Birthday Ireland!!

Our birthdays have been pretty low key this year.  No one has had parties, but our friends across the street just happen to have the same birthday as Ireland!  Well, we HAD to have them over and share dinner together!  She opened her presents which consisted of her cowgirl hat, a pair of shoes, and a rug for her room...that's what she asked for and that's what she got!   Ireland has been such a blessing in our lives!  She is just so fun to have around.  She is usually independent.  I think she has just the right amount of girly stuff, but can play tough too!  I am so happy she is with us and we love her so much!

Our little getaway

                                                               William and Mary College

                                                                Colonial Williamsburg

                                                                      Pocahontas

                                                                       
                                                                        Jamestown

With Lynne in town Jamie and I decided to leave her with the kids and skip town for a couple of days. You would be surprised at how hard it was for us to find a couple of days to steal away, but we made it work!  We stayed pretty local and went down to Williamsburg.  It is only a 2 1/2 hour drive.  Colonial Williamsburg was good, but I loved the little campus of the William and Mary College.  Everything was so quaint.  The streets were all brick with fun little colonial shops with a college feel.  I also loved Jamestown.  They had a great archaeological site they have done a lot of work on with a lot of relics found in the area!  Since Anthropology is my college degree I found it very interesting how much they knew about the settlers there because of the things they left behind.

Harrison!

Harrison had the Elementary solo and ensemble performance while Grandma was here so Grandma got to hear him play his saxophone with a friend from school.  They played great together!  It was so fun to hear.  I always hear him playing by himself but it was fun to see how they played together and balanced each other out.  Harrison has so much fun with his music.  He just takes it and runs with it!

Washington DC

We rode the metro into the city with Lynne.  It has been a cold spring so the cherry blossoms hadn't come on yet.  Normally this time of year they would be blooming.  So we took a picture of the tree with some buds starting to form :)  We saw the new Martin Luther King Jr. monument.  This picture is only half of it!  It is massive and incredible.  We saw all the monuments and saw the bureau of engraving and printing.  That was really neat to see all that paper money in one building!! Wow!  32 million dollars per pallet!  Yikes!!  We bought the kids a souvenir.  It was a bag of money!  $150 worth...shredded up!  They didn't appreciate it or see the humor like i thought they would.  When money is printed and there is a flaw they cannot put it in circulation so they reuse them by making things out of them for us to buy :).

It's Sugar!!

I am sure I have blogged this before, but, awe well!  This is one of our family's favorite stores!  Giant sized candies!  Need I say more!?

Baltimore

At the Harbor in Baltimore there are several ships that you can tour.  This is just a couple of them.

Fort McHenry

I never tire of going here.  The visitor's center is wonderful with a great video sharing how the star-spangled banner came to be.  It is very moving when the video is over as we look out in the distance and see the American flag waving and what that meant for the people after the fight. The fort itself is so fun for the kids too!