Cute Kid Pix October 2023

More pictures that did not make their own post...

My youngest finally had his first baseball game after two weeks of rain outs. He had a good time, getting on base with a hit and scoring the first run for his team. His age-level is the first kid-pitch level, so a bunch of players made it on base from walks. The game ended in a 3-3 tie, which may have been appropriate since it was Nationals versus Cardinals and all the players had the same color jerseys. Everyone had fun on a sunny Sunday.

They get to steal too, so here he is on second

And on third

My son finished off a "building bricks" set that is not Legos. He made George Washington's Mount Vernon, a place we visited some time ago. 

Not the happiest builder in the country

With scouts, we did some outdoor cooking, including foil packet dinners on the grill. The boys loved it!

Yummy self-made dinner!

My eldest had another debate at which I was a judge. I wound up being a proctor for the Extemperaneous Speaking competition, which meant I handed out the topics to the participants thirty minutes before they talked about it. The time was for them to research the topic and prepare seven minutes of remarks.

I had a couple of breaks and wandered around the campus of Calvert Hall College High School, named after a Catholic colonial leader and led by Salesian Brothers, so the statue on campus is of Cecil Calvert and Jean-Baptiste de La Salle. 

Teamwork!

Another patron--Our Lady of the Library!

My youngest had his final game at the end of the month, which they won 12-13 against the Orioles. Fall ball has a very short season and no playoffs!

On third

He's also had fun playing board games, including the popular Pandemic. 

Victory!

Our dance studio, That's Dancing, had a Halloween party. We dressed up in cowboy outfits. One couple came as Barbie and Ken, so I took a turn in the Ken box as "Cowboy Ken Doll." Our niece came to the dance too!

Dressed up for dancing

Dancing

Ready to be bought

My wife danced herself to the bone!

The cub scouts had a pack meeting where kids dressed up. My youngest reused his baseball uniform as a Halloween costume.

Discussing ring toss strategy

Going for a hat trick

As for actual Halloween, we never took a picture of our youngest in his outfit (the Link outfit from a birthday party earlier in the year), but we did get a shot of his candy collection in a bar chart.

Do they learn this in school?

Mount Vernon School Trip 2019

We visited Mount Vernon as a family last year. My son's fifth grade class went on a field trip this year and I was selected to be a chaperon. We saw a lot of the same stuff but also some new things. Here's some new stuff!

I was in charge of a group of five boys (including my son). We walked around for a bit visiting the blacksmith shop and other outer buildings before we had to go on the mansion tour. The tour featured some construction but was basically the same.

Outside construction too!

Somehow we went through early (i.e. before the rest of the class) and had the opportunity to sit on the back porch of the main house, enjoying the view of the Potomac. One of the docents said that George Washington claimed this was the most beautiful spot in all the country.

Potomac view

We walked down the hill to the Washingtons' tomb. We saw the old tomb on the way, which is basically a mound with a brick entrance overlooking the river. In George's will, he directed that a larger tomb be built for the family. It took several years to complete, so the family used the old tomb before they moved into the new tomb.

Tomb of Washington

We had a special tour later in the day that took our whole group back to the tomb for a wreath-laying ceremony. Jacob's best friend was selected to help with the ceremony. They brought out a wreath and then led the class in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Wreath-laying ceremony

The boys in my group chatted with our tour guide about the slavery memorial and burial ground. It's not far from Washington's tomb, so she offered to take us there. The memorial in the middle was set up by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, with a design by student from Howard University.

She also showed us the excavations on the site where archeologists have been looking for graves. They dig down to the level roughly equivalent to Washington's time and look for signs. The most obvious sign is a rectangular yellowish patch of soil. When someone is buried, the dirt is taken out and put back in, causing the color to change slightly from the surrounding, undisturbed dirt. The archeologists are only locating graves, not removing the contents.

Hard to see the yellow dirt on this picture, but it was definitely there

They've found eighty graves so far and have been marking them with stone piles. Unfortunately, the most obvious piles were hidden by a fallen tree limb. Also, I was fairly reluctant to take pictures since I was on chaperone duty.

As we headed back for the shelter of the air-conditioned museum (which has plenty of videos to watch), we heard a fife-player walking to a corner of the bowling green. We followed the musician as if he were the Pied Piper. He had a nice presentation on music from the time of George Washington, focusing mostly on military songs. Then he drafted a bunch of the kids to carry flags and wooden rifles. They practiced marching in regular and quick time. He used his drum to make sure they'd march to the beat.

Leading the march

After one round of marching, he recruited a parent who knew how to drum. A second march ensued with fife and drum leading the way.

Increasing the ranks

Marching at us

He then asked if the soldiers get paid. People actually had different answers about that. The musician said he had good news and bad news. The good news was that soldiers did get paid. The bad news was that today was not payday! He relented pretty quickly and handed out fake, oversized one dollar bills to each of the kids.

As we walked back to the museum, one of the boys conveniently remembered that he forgot his water bottle at the fife and drum/marching demonstration. We walked back to get it. Then he jumped in for another round of marching, which meant another dollar of pay!

We finally returned to the visitor center/museum to watch a few of the films and take one last bathroom break before getting back on the buses.

The day was long but very informative. My daughter will be a fifth-grader next year, so I may get to go again.

Mount Vernon, Virginia

Just before school began this year (2017), we squeezed in one more George Washington-related location (after visiting Valley Forge and his Boston Headquarters). We visited his home, Mount Vernon, just south of the nation's capital. My children were disappointed that there was no actual mountain involved, though they shouldn't have been because that meant a lot less climbing to get around.

Being early risers, we headed out early on Labor Day morning. The traffic was delightfully non-existent. We arrived just as the estate was opening. We had purchased tickets on line and had an easy time walking in and having a worker scan the bar code of our print out (we aren't quite savvy enough to use a QR code on our mobile phone).

View from parking (which was also good since we were early)

Entrance for visitors

The first place was the Ford Orientation Center with plenty of interesting and informative displays about Washington, the estate, and the history of the area. The kids weren't so interested so we went through quickly.

We did see a sculpture of the Washington family circa 1785. George and Martha are in their fifties. They had no children of their own but Martha had a son, John Parke Custis, whose children were raised by George and Martha after John died in 1781. The boy is George Washington Parke Custis and the girl is Eleanor Parke Custis.

George, Martha, and grandchildren

A stained-glass display shows various important events in Washington's life. This photo is the closest I got to looking at it.

Probably a really awesome display

The children were eager to try out Agent 711 Revolutionary Spy Adventure, a mobile device app that lets visitors decode secret messages and eavesdrop on British soldiers to support the war effort. The first location is a nineteenth-century well house which had been erected near the mansion's kitchen in the 1870s. Historical research in the twentieth century revealed that Washington never built a well house at that location, so in order to preserve the way the estate was in 1799 (the year George died), the well was moved to the 12-acre field just outside the bowling green leading up to the mansion.

Well House

Discovering a clue

Bowling Green view of the Mansion

Closer view of the mansion

We still had a half hour before we were supposed to tour the mansion, so we worked on more of our spy mission. From the well we went to the Upper Garden greenhouse for the next clue.

Upper Garden greenhouse

The garden is the typical combination of practical and ornamental plants that would support the house's kitchen and decor. Washington did have a lot of visitors back in the day.

Garden

Growing things

One tree in the garden, a pomelo, had some interesting fruit on it.

Pomelo tree

Is this some sort of ingenious genetic variation?

By the corner of the greenhouse we found a jug that helped reveal a hidden message written in Revolutionary-era invisible ink (at least that was the claim on the app). The kids enjoyed decoding and finding a new location to explore.

More spy stuff

More garden stuff

Growing grapes

Cute shrubs

Our next spy location was the Blacksmith Shop. On the way we saw a long building that had various uses. One room was the Women's Bunk Room, where ten to fifteen female slaves lived. They most likely worked at the mansion or the outbuildings where the sewing, cooking, and laundry was done. They may have had their children working and living with them.

Bunks of the women's bunk room (plus laundry)

Fireplace and kitchen

Next door is the shoemaker's shop with a few tools of the trade on display.

Shoemaker's shop

The next room is the Stove Room. The building is on the back of the greenhouse and the stove room generated the heat needed to keep citrus and tropical plants growing in Virginia weather, especially the winters. A flue system distributed the heat through the greenhouse floor. Someone (typically a slave) would have to stay in the room from late fall to early spring to keep the fire burning.

The Stove Room

The next room housed the male slaves who worked on the estate in various positions.

Men's Bunk Room

Men's fireplace and kitchen

A short walk down the path led us to the Blacksmith Shop which is still in use today. Currently, they make any of the iron work that is needed in the mansion or estate to replace worn-out original items. The men working there were very informative and chatty, making for an interesting visit. We did the same trick from our Williamsburg visit, asking about apprenticing our son as a blacksmith. The man said our son still had five or six years before he would be apprenticed.

Blacksmith shop

Talking to a shop worker

The smithy working his bellows

Just outside the shop is a road with some of the support buildings.

Overseer's quarters, spinning house, salt house

Time had come for our tour of the mansion, so we suspended our spy hunt (the next location was the ice house on the other side of the estate). The mansion was impressive, especially how well the tour was organized. Groups of ten to fifteen were taken in at a time. Each room had a docent who gave a five-minute description of the room and its function, along with historical anecdotes. The group then moved to the next room for the next five-minute description. The descriptions often started with, "Don't follow that other group into the next room!" Photography is not allowed in the mansion, so no pictures!

Waiting on the mansion tour

View from the back porch

One of the most interesting items on display was in Washington's office. He had a chair with foot pedals that worked a fan directly above the chair. This contraption was as close as they came to air conditioning in the 1790s!

The kitchen is a separate building (typical for the time--one doesn't want the heat and potential fire damage in the main house) and photography was allowed. One boy asked about Washington's diet. The docent said that Washington preferred soft foods like fish because of his dentures. They certainly served fancy, multi-course meals on a regular basis especially since visitors were common. The mansion typically served breakfast in the morning and dinner around 3 p.m., with a smaller tea-type meal in the evening.

The kitchen for the big house

On the way to the ice house (where they stored ice from the river), we saw the stables and the coach house.

Stables 

Coach house

The ice house provided a dramatic moment in the spy app--a chance to overhear British troops discussing their plans!

Ice house

The next clue near the stables

To send a message to the revolutionary spies, we had to find the laundry and hang it out in a certain order to show where the information was hidden.

Look for the laundry

Approaching the basket

We were nearing the final clues of the spy mission at the Wash House, where laundry was done.

Wash House

The final bit was to find a worker with a red lanyard in the mansion circle. We found just such a person though my children were too shy to talk. I bravely asked, "Excuse me, are you wearing a red lanyard?" She said, "I think I know what you are looking for..." and gave us the final prize for completing our spy mission.

Mansion Circle

After such a full morning, we had lunch at the estate's food court (which doesn't date back to the 1790s) and saw a bit of the other museum on the estate. Pictures inside the museum are not allowed, so I have none to show. We did get to see a couple of short movies describing Washington's life. We also saw his false teeth which were both fascinating and a bit horrifying. They were made from other human teeth, ivory, and animal teeth! It made me glad for modern dentistry.

I was amazed at this counter-relief depiction of George Washington (at the entrance of the museum exhibit, so I guess it was okay to take a picture?). From the front, it looks like a normal relief depiction of the first president of the United States. But closer examination or especially looking from the side reveals the true nature of the sculpture--indented rather than outdented!

George Washington

Viewed from the right side

The estate had a lot more we could have seen (like Washington's tomb, a pioneer farm, the slave memorial, the sixteen-sided barn, etc.) but the toddler was ready for nap time. We will probably visit again since it is not too far from home, at least when there isn't traffic.