On the second day of our trip to Washington, DC, we were in the mood to do something else touristy, so we decided to visit the National Air and Space Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution. It had been recommended to us by friends who had taken their two daughters there the day before, so we wanted to see it.
As scheduled, we left for the museum in the afternoon. It would have been a tedious hike with the three small people in tow, so we grabbed a taxi instead.
We, Island Mom and her large staff, interrupt this blog to bring you this important public service announcement:
If you are planning on traveling to D.C., bring cash if you want to take taxis. A large percentage of the cabs only take cash, which proved to be a major hurdle for She Who Does Not Carry Cash. I have the background music to the “The More You Know†NBC commercials playing in my head right now. I know I’m stating the obvious here to 99.9% of my audience, who haven’t been holed up on a small island somewhere for the last several years. But, my heart goes out to the .1% of oblivious people out there, like me.
We now return to the previously scheduled post.
My small people like riding in taxis, something only the tourists and the severely inebriated do on our island. So, I knew they were excited about the ride, but I was completely unprepared for my daughter’s reaction at its conclusion. The boys and I slid out of the taxi, but she literally threw herself prostrate on the back seat of the taxi, face planted in the seat, and said with a wail, “I don’t want to leave the taxi!†Did I mention she’s four?
I think I just stared at her for a good five seconds, dumbstruck. Rarely am I this unprepared for a parenting moment, and usually, when I am caught off-guard, it’s by her brother, not by her. I could hear my boys laughing behind me, and even the cab driver, who had been comatose up until that moment, started laughing. “I’ll be back to pick you up after you see the museum, okay?†he said to my daughter. I guess he figured, to a four-year-old, the backs of all cab drivers’ heads look the same.
I kid you not, I had to peel my baby-girl out of that cab. If I had had the foresight to take a picture, it would have appeared in this blog and at her wedding.
Incidentally, the backseat of the cab looked as clean as a taxi seat can possibly look, but I was fully aware that it was so obviously not clean in the it’s-riddled-with-germs-and-all–manner-of-invisible-nastiness sense. If the whole incident hadn’t taken me so much by surprise, I would have had an OCD moment right in front of the museum. I certainly had a few while we were in the museum, with all the buttons and handles to be groped indiscriminately.
Once inside, I thought maybe the idea of going to the museum was a mistake. It was packed with people, and I had one parental figure (myself) to keep track of all three small people in a loud, highly tactile environment. And I will make this disclaimer: despite the educational nature of the museum, I think I learned a whole lot of nothing. This was certainly not the museum’s fault, as there was plenty of learning to be had for probably every other person but myself. However, those mothers who have dared to stand where I stood know why I learned nothing, and those mothers who are way too wise to do what I did know why I learned nothing, because at one point in time, they spent a full half-second imagining what this would be like and shrewdly chose another option, like ordering room service and watching a documentary on the museum from the safety of their hotel rooms.
At the end of the day, you can’t read a plaque, a paragraph, or a word without risking losing one of the small people you came with, so you don’t read. You constantly scan, like Secret Service police. Child 1, child 2, child 3, again. Child 1, child 2, child 3, repeat. We had to establish rules about always, always staying with the group.
That being said, our friends were right. It was a great museum for kids, with lots of hands-on exhibits and sections of airplanes and spacecrafts the kids could walk through or, in some cases, sit in. I wish my husband could have been there (he was in meetings), because he would have been able to get into his geeky engineer mode and talk about many of the exhibits while I kept an eye out for stragglers. All in all, however, we had a good time, and even if I didn’t learn as much as I would have liked, I think the kids themselves learned quite a bit
I read this post a few days ago, but didn’t have the time to reply. I laughed so hard about being in a rich learning environment, and yet learning nothing. I feel that way all the time whenever we take the kiddos somewhere education, and we spend 99.9% of the time “herding the cats” and .1% of the time actually reading or teaching them something. Sometimes all you can hope for is crowd control, and hope that the educational aspect sinks in through osmosis.
Glad I’m not the only one!