Washington D.C.- Museums

If you surveyed my toddlers, museums (not counting ones geared toward children), would most likely not make the list of things they consider fun. And yet, we managed to enjoy one or more museums as a family every day for a week in Washington D.C.- I'm pretty content with that!

At the American History Museum, they do have a small children's playroom. We stopped there first to get out some wiggles and they had a blast climbing and sliding. It allowed them to have a much longer museum attention span than they would have otherwise had.

My favorite section is the First Lady inaugural gowns. I tried to convince Magnolia that they were princess dresses, but she's too much of a princess expert to be fooled by that. There's a fun spot in the president section where you can stand at the podium and read a teleprompter and see your face on a few screens. The girls were fans of that.

We also managed to walk through the war and culture sections. There's a piece of the stage from the Woodstock Music Festival where the girls took a dance break.

We all enjoyed seeing the original star-spangled banner. This is the gigantic (30 x 42 ft originally, some fabric has been lost) flag that flew over Fort McHenry in the harbor of Baltimore. When Francis Scott Key saw the flag flying the morning after the famous 1814 battle, he knew the British had been defeated and wrote the poem that became our national anthem.

There are no pictures allowed inside the exhibit, but what we found most interesting was the family that owned it after the war used to sell scraps of the flag for souvenirs, so there are holes in the fabric. It didn't come to the Smithsonian until the 20th century. 

As if that wasn't enough America for one day, we also stopped at the National Archives before our visit to the history museum. This was a great place for small kids for two reasons- it's a short visit, and the security guards are very nice.

It's definitely worth a stop to see the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights on display in a beautiful rotunda. Magnolia was so inspired she got out of the stroller to dance. She was told by the laughing guard that "dancing is allowed, but no running."

We were intrigued by the Museum of the Bible and thought there was no better activity to do on a Sunday. It just opened in 2017, and you can tell everything looks sparkling and brand new. There are exhibits on biblical history and archeology, as well as the Bible's impact on world culture.

We spent most of our time there in the interactive exhibits. The New Testament section is a recreation of the village of Nazareth in the first century. The girls loved walking through the village and especially seeing the animals. You can walk through a house, mikvah, synagogue and more and see what the daily life was like in the time of Jesus.

I don't even know how to describe the Hebrew Bible section. You walk from room to room to hear the story of the whole Old Testament. There are videos and all sorts of displays and sounds and flashing lights. The ceiling lights up with stars when it talks about God's promise to Abraham. You walk through a rainbow room when the flood is over. There's smoke that comes from the burning bush, etc. 

Rosalie was kind of afraid and needed cuddles. Magnolia liked parts of it but thought some parts were scary. I'm sure slightly older kids would love it; it was extremely cool.

Like the American History Museum, the Bible Museum also has a playroom. We took turns watching the girls there while the other one of us checked out the gift shop. I was very delighted to find a "Baby's First Biblical Hebrew" board book. This whole museum reminded me so much of my Israel study abroad.

We were able to fit in the Museum of Natural History the morning before we flew home. It wasn't originally part of our plans, but I'm so glad we made it! This place probably turned out to be the girls' favorite museum.

They were absolutely amazed by the elephant in the entrance hall.

There was more excitement when they realized that there were many more animals to be discovered. Rosalie was most excited to see "Simba" and Magnolia to see her favorite animal, a giraffe. She wasn't excited to stay still to take a picture, however.

I think my babies are little enough that they didn't realize that the animals weren't alive. It made it more magical and made me feel less bad that we didn't make it to the zoo on this trip! 

We did a quick walk through the dinosaur and ocean sections (with Rosalie saying "BIG!" at every dinosaur) before they ran out of steam. After a week of sightseeing, their museum stamina was low even when they were interested in the displays.

David and I took turns visiting a few more museums during nap time. He LOVED the Air and Space Museum, and I'm so glad I had a chance to visit the Holocaust Museum.

I spent a lot of time at Israel's Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem. And I'm obviously very interested in this period of history considering I did graduate studies in this topic.

This museum, like Yad Vashem, was extremely well done, extremely educational, and extremely devastating. I know it's been a while (I finished my program in 2016), but I thought I was pretty desensitized to anything related to the Holocaust after a lot of studies. It turns out that becoming a mom erases any desensitization you may have built up, because I found it to be pretty emotional and hard to walk through.

This room is covered in 50 years of photos from one small shtetl in Lithuania called Eishishok. There was a Jewish community there for 900 years. In 1941, the entire community was obliterated in 2 days by an SS killing squad aided by eager Lithuanian volunteers.

At one point you walk on actual cobblestones from the Warsaw ghetto- the largest out of the  thousand-ish Jewish ghettoes established by the Nazis. About 80,000 people died there due to the horrible living conditions and another 300,000 were deported directly from the Warsaw ghetto to extermination camps. It was also the site of a heroic uprising in 1943 as the Germans attempted to finish liquidating the ghetto.

I could go on forever, but I'll stop with an art piece that's found at the end of the museum. It's called "One Thousand and Seventy-Eight Blue Skies." It features a picture of the sky above each of the known Nazi concentration camps and killing centers across Europe. Each photo is stamped with a GPS coordinate. I couldn't even get all of them in my picture, but it gives you a sense of how massive this genocide was.

There are many more museums in D.C. but we're happy we managed to see what we did. So far our plot to brainwash our children to enjoy museums and history is going pretty smoothly.