The White House and Renwick Gallery

Frankly, I've been afraid to try to tackle downtown DC by myself with the kids.  Sunday we finally (for the first time) just drove downtown and back after church without even getting out.  The GPS was dumb and took us a LONG way that google has never even mentioned.  So I ditched the GPS and today I ventured downtown with the kids the way that google says to go.  MUCH better.  I saw on Sunday that Constitution Ave is almost all free 3 hour parking between like 9:00 and 4:00, so that was the goal for parking.  And I've also heard that there is a Renwick Gallery with really cool exhibits, so that was one thing I wanted us to do.  This entire day was made possible by Rylee's backpack and Corben's monkey.  I felt like a dog handler, but they did great.  Relatively speaking.  And Baylor didn't cry once in the carrier.  The weather was BEAUTIFUL.  Mid 60's and sunny with a breeze.

First picture of the day right after we got out of the car was of course the best one of the two of them. 

At the Renwick Gallery (the link goes into more detail about what's in the pictures).  The cool rainbow is made up of what must be thousands of individual strings.  It was painful for Rylee not to be able to touch them! 

The struggle is real.

These 'mountains' were made from index cards.  It was pretty crazy.

Giant  birds nest/bee hive things.  At least the kids got to touch them!

Made from individual marbles.

Shredded tires

lol...a bunch of bugs on the wall. This one made Corben nervous and he kept saying he wanted to leave that room.

Our first glimpse of the White House through the trees.  So I don't know if I would have noticed the gazillion Secret Service guys everywhere if it wasn't what Jonathan will be doing, but honestly they were everywhere (that's some walking in the picture there)

So at one point there were some Secret Service guys and one of them was a canine officer so of course Corben asks him if he can pet the dog.  So I explained that he couldn't because the dog had a sign on it saying not to pet it.  But the officer told Corben he could talk to the dog which Corben proceeded to do.  While the kids were looking/talking to the dog, another officer kind of behind me asked if the kids could have a treat.  He pulled out two little boxes full of Hershey kisses that the kids loved.  Now several times that we saw officers, I told Rylee and Corben that that's what Jonathan's job would be when he gets done with training.  So later when we get home and I told Rylee to tell Jonathan about our day.  All that she got out of the whole day was that Jonathan was going to be a Chocolate Man and hand out chocolate to kids. lol

The kids were troopers.  Not counting actually walking around inside the museum, we walked about 2 miles.  Towards the end Rylee kept saying, "My feet are really slowing down."  Corben only asked once if I could carry him...which of course I couldn't since I was already carrying Baylor. Overall, though, I call the day a success and I'm excited to take them back and walk the mall. 

Oh...so I forgot one cool thing that happened.  As we were walking back to the car, we were walking down 15th street and just about to cross the driveway to the White House when this SS guy rides up on his bike, blocks our path, and tells us to all stop (Corben was dying to touch the bike just 2 feet away).  So they block off the entire intersection and about 2 minutes later 4 blacked out SUVs leave the White House.  Obama fan, or not, it was pretty cool to think that the president was most likely just passing by.  The kids were oblivious and just kept trying to climb the retaining wall next to the sidewalk. lol

The rectangle is where we were standing in this streetview of where we were when they blocked the sidewalk