DC in June in a heat wave

I’m sitting in the pleasantly frigid basement of my aunt and uncle’s house in Arlington, Virginia. I’m waiting for a last load of laundry to dry so I can pack it and go to bed; our flight is at noon tomorrow, but since we are traveling with children we should probably get up at the crack of dawn to make our flight.

That last post called “teasers” was actually false advertising, since it implied that I will have more cute and funny stories to tell — actually, that post contained the the sum total of cute or funny things from this week-and-a-half trip. Most of the rest of the trip was spent with Mabel telling us how her stomach hurt and she was sure she had heat stroke and she hates history and she doesn’t want to hear about history and she never wants to come to Washington D.C. again — or, at least not in summer. This was punctuated by the sound of me or Dean shouting to Isaac to catch Henry before he ran into the road (or off the Metro platform onto the rails, or down the escalator without us, or down the marble stairs in the Capitol headfirst,) followed by Isaac catching Henry around the knees, causing Henry to fall on his face, followed by the sound of Henry screaming. Other typical sounds were the same scenario as above, only with Mabel as the knee-catcher or Rose as the escapee; we also heard a lot of Mabel threatening to give Rose a time-out or to lock Rose in a cave or eat Rose’s favorite plush toy lamb. (When you assign your older kids to help keep your younger kids safe, sometimes their sense of authority extends beyond the parameters you intended.) Also there was a lot of Rose and/or Henry falling on their faces without any assistance.

That’s what the trip sounded like. What it felt like was: get up, get a shower, get all clean and groomed, go outside, and within five minutes become completely drenched with sweat, while your hair goes limp and frizzy. Come home, shower, repeat.

When we were discussing whether to do this trip, Dean said something like, “You realize it will mean we’ll be walking around all day in the humidity and heat, right?” But when I asked whether there was a 10-day stretch in the early spring or fall when he could take a trip to DC with me and the kids, he conceded there wasn’t — so we planned to go as early in the summer as possible, and left the Saturday after the kids got out of school. And then there was a heat wave in D.C. At least I’d been warned.

We did, however, first get two lovely days at Virginia Beach, and I’m mostly coming away with a renewed sense that: I love D.C. At least all the museums have good air conditioning, and there’s so much to see. And, traveling with kids is very hard (my formula is to expect to spend at least 1/2 our waking hours in childcare or doing laundry, etc., and it’s a pretty reliable formula) but all that work does stretch my heartstrings out wider around my kids — and in between all the shrieking and whining, they did and said a lot of really sweet and cute things, too. (Yeah, maybe I’ll even remember some to include in another post. We’ll see.)

Well, most of the laundry is dry and I can start getting ready for bed. Tomorrow: more sweltering, two airplanes, more kid-herding. And home.

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