Charlotte looking a bit bored at the Library of Congress
Charlotte’s school had their “Open House” a couple of weeks ago, and as we were combing over her classroom, looking for whatever clues we could find about third grade, I came across a bulletin board with a collection of “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” papers stapled to it. Each had a paragraph of text and an illustration of that child’s adventure. It didn’t take me too long to find Charlotte’s: her drawing depicted the Washington Monument (easy to draw, natch) and herself, approximately half again as tall as the obelisk.
Our time in DC was a bit of a whirlwind. We certainly came nowhere near seeing every important site, but we tried to make sure that our daily itineraries covered all the things we felt we wanted to see most of all. In four days we covered the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress, the Air & Space Museum, the American History Museum, the Natural History Museum, a side trip to Mount Vernon, and a nighttime bus tour of the monuments. I took a couple thousand pictures, even though one of our cameras bought the farm right in the middle of our tour of the Capitol. Even *I* was sometimes left jaw-droppingly stunned by some of the things we saw, and we managed to have a good time the whole time.
So, what did my child pick out as the absolute highlight of her first visit to the nation’s capital? She wrote that her favorite part of our trip was the evening that we were too tired to go out to dinner after spending all day walking around museums so we ordered in pizza to be delivered to our hotel room and she got to watch cartoons on TV while Bridget and I took a nap.
Of such things are the memories of our childhoods writ large in the tablets of our minds.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
What I love about this story is the way it confirms that where you go and what activities you do with your child(ren) isn’t as significant as the simple fact that you spend time together, as a family. And it’s not that Charlotte won’t necessarily remember all those landmarks (or at least some of them), but the down-time in between activities becomes that much more precious when you have shared these common experiences together. Plus, she got to be the grown-up while Mon and Dad took naps, which has to be the coolest ever! (Well, until it becomes the norm and you guys are ready to be shipped off to the home.)
Frankly, it reminds me of Charlotte’s first Christmas, where her mother and her two grandmothers all over-shopped and bought a metric assload of presents for this child (who was seven months old). On Christmas morning, after the unbridled orgy of tearing through all the wrapping paper and ooh-ing and aah-ing over way too many presents, Charlotte simply ignored the pile of toys in the living room and played with the empty boxes and wrappings.
Perhaps she is just saying she likes to be home and cozy more than traveling and learning. A simple girl at heart.
Given how much Charlotte loves staying in hotels and ordering room service, I don’t think she’s the simple-pleasures type.
This is the classic the box is the best part of the gift story…the kid doesn’t care about the thing they do, they care about the experience. When the thing becomes, well the thing, then they are teens.