Never, ever, EVER buy solid-color furniture unless it’s leather if you have small children. You’re just asking for pain…

When your wife is sick and you offer to go out and get her anything she wants and take the brat, er, child with you, that gets you many bonus points.

However, when you say, “My God, you look dead!” before you leave, you lose some of those points.

I’ve been added a newsletter list somehow that is somewhere off the horizon of sanity–one of the fiercely anti-governmental lists decrying birth certificates as certificates of ownership by the FEDERAL CORPORATE STATE (in all caps, of course). Most of the article was incoherent, and that which wasn’t referenced urban legends and just plain got the facts wrong. The only way I can think that anyone got my email for this list was being harvested from a homeschooling list somewhere.

People worry about homeschoolers being monocultural and isolated from people with differing opinions. I disagree. You’ll meet more people with wildly differing beliefs than you thought existed. Sure, some of them are nutjobs, but there goes the argument about homeschooled kids being insulated from “real life.”

Annapolis Fourth of July celebrations

Parade:
Rating: ***
Review: There were some cool things, but there were also a lot of people who weren;t paying attention to ME.
SFTBM: “Fire truck! Fire truck! Fire truck!” “Cool bicycle!” “I like the cars!”

Naval Academy Band
Rating: ****
Review: Watching people play real live intruments just a few feet away from me was cool, but about 3/4ths of the way through the celebration, I relized how much better I could do than all the performers. Mommy spoiled my big debute by physically restraining me when I announced my intentions of taking over.
STFBM: “I play it!”

Fireworks
Rating: **********************
Review: WOW! It explodes! Noise! Light! Violence in the skies! What more could a boy WANT? After the first 10 minutes or so, after I could manage to tear my eyes away from the glorious sight, I tried to take off to make sure that EVERYONE else on the wharf was seeing it, too, but Mom held me back and assured me that they knew it was going on, too.
SFTBM: “WOW! Cool fireworks! FireCRACKERS! Fireworks in the SKY! Ooooooo… Coooool… Fireworks! LOTS of fireworks! Lights in the sky! FIREWORKS! See the fireworks? Pretty fireworks?”

A CONVERSATION WITH MOMMY ON THE WHARF
Me: (whining) Water! I want to go in the water! Ducks in the water!
Mommy: You don’t want to go in the water. It’s over your head. You’d drown.
Me: I WANT the water!
Mommy: You don’t know how to swim!
Me: (desperate) I can swim! I can swim!
Mommy: (darkly) Kid, don’t tempt me.

Despite my best efforts, we stayed out of the water.

DH is on a 10-week business trip in the DC area, so I came along, too, because I’m much more of a weenie than Larissa is and because I can.

Instead of going on a detailed description of the sights we’ve seen, I’ll give our visits from the Bear’s point of view.

Museum of American History
Rating: *-*****, depending on exhibit

On Time
Rating: ****
Review: Clocks and interactive stations! What more could a preschooler want? Ok, this preschooler would really like to TOUCH the clocks that the EVIL CURATORS put behind glass, but except for a few meltdowns (hey, this was my first time in a museum and I hadn’t adjusted to the “look but don’t touch” setup), this was a blast.
Straight From the Bear’s Mouth: “Clock! Clock! ALARM clock! Oooh, cool! Look at this! Mickey Mouse cartoooon. I take it. I take the clock. I take the clooooooooock!!!!”

First Ladies
Rating: *
Review: Who would want to look at this garbage?
SFTBM: “WHAAAAAAAAAAA! Dresses! Pfffhhtt! Gross! Yucky! It makes me SICK! Guns! I want guns!”

Historical Firearms
Rating: *****
Review: Heaven. Pure heaven.
SFTBM: “Gun! Gun! Rifle! I take it! I want the gun! (Insert startlingly realistic sounds of 1) a rifle firing in burst mode and then 2) a shotgun, complete with rechambering effect. Add other adults shooting looks at us somewhere between admiration and horror.)”

A house through history
Rating: N/A
Review: I slept.

Separate is Not Equal: Brown v. Board of Education
Rating: **
Review: There was a cool schoolroom set up, the only thing that kept me from screaming.

America on the Move (transporation)
Rating: ****
Review: Trains and cars and more TRAINS!

Inventing Ourselves, Information Age:
Rating: ***
Review: I was getting kind of tired here. But there was chess, phones, chess, computers, and CHESS! CHESS!!!!
SFTBM: “Chess! Chess! I want to play CHESS!” (No, he doesn’t know how. He thinks he loves it, though, and I have no idea why.)

Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revolution, 1790–1860, Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration 1915–1940, Agriculture:
Rating: ****
Review: I did these at a dead sprint, so I didn’t see much, but boy, I sure did have fun.
SFTBM: (Insert madly giggling here) “Come ON, Mommy!”

Musical Instruments:
Rating: ****
Review: MUSIC!!!! YAY!!!!
SFTBM: “A violin! A violin! MY violin! A hooooorn!”

Gunboat Philadelphia:
Rating: ***
Review: A boat with a gun! How exciting!

Whatever Happened to Polio?:
Rating: **
Review: Well, I didn’t scream, but I was BORED.

Bon Appétit! Julia Child’s Kitchen at the Smithsonian:
Rating: *
Review: I only calmed down because Mommy threatened my life.

Americans at War
Rating: ****
Review: There were horses and cool stuff to look at and interactive things and a helicopter and GUNS!
SFTBM: “It’s a CANNON!” “Ooooooo…a helicopter!”

The monuments:
Rating: ***
Review: I got pushed around a lot in the stroller. It’s a good day when I got pushed around a lot in the stroller. (No Washington Monument, though.)
Quote: “Water! I want the water!” (at the Tidal Basin) “No! No water! Go away! Go away! Up, up, up!” (when Mommy tried to put him down in the spray of the FDR memorial)

The Botanic Gardens:
Rating: ***
Review: Lots of cool things to look at, plenty of stroller time, and I could splashing water at the Children’s Garden and I even heard a frog. And there was a rreally cool house just my size!
SFTBM: “I’m in the house! MY house!” “Frog! It’s a frog!” “I touch the waaater.”