That’s a line from Olivia one of Seamus and Gilbert’s favorite books. I’m choosing to apply it to my Granny (or G-G, as the boys call her) this week.
G-G came to visit us for the weekend. It was a whirlwind of fun and excitement! Here’s what we did:
- Ate at the BGR The Burger Joint. This may seem like an odd choice for a vegetarian, but we were starving and it was close and had a pretty surprisingly good veggie burger!
- Farmer’s Market visit in the morning.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial visit. This was a blast! (I think I’ve mentioned before that this is one of my absolute favorite memorials.) The boys were climbing all over everything, and they enchanted some 18-20 year old French-speaking girls. The girls were taking more pictures of them than of the monument.
- Walk around the Tidal Basin.
- Visit to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. I like this one, but it’s not as fun as the FDR–requires more respect.
- G-G and I paid a visit to Politics and Prose, an independent bookstore in DC. It was so cool. I have a shirt from there, but I’d never been.
- The boys woke up late on Saturday, so we didn’t go to a party that we had been planning to go to. I had found some white elephant gifts though, so I might have to figure out what to do with them.
- We took a walk to the park, Seamus riding his bike, and they showed G-G how they go down the slide (on our bellies! just a little, teeny-tiny bit scared!), swing really high, and rake sand in the sand box.
- Patrick made enchiladas and guacamole.
- A quick visit to Great Falls National Park. Very cool, even with the water levels a little low. The boys were hilarious. We were trying to keep them from jumping in puddles, because we wanted to get a family picture right afterwards, so they contented themselves with throwing rocks in puddles and running over the bridges. Right as we were leaving, we encountered a puddle, and Patrick said to Seamus, “Jump!” and he meant over it, but S jumped right in it. Then P fussed at Seamus, and S looked surprised, and then we all started laughing, because, “Dada told you to jump and you thought he meant in the puddle and he meant over the puddle and isn’t that silly!” Seamus and Gilbert began repeating this mantra.
- Quick family picture at Grandude and Grandma’s.
- Patrick dropped G-G and me off at metro, where we went downtown to the National Portrait Gallery to catch the Modern Poets exhibit! Very cool. And we happened upon a tour with University of Maryland students who were bringing the portraits in different parts of the gallery to life. We saw Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Julia Ward Howe, Sylvia Plath, Dolley Madison, Marian Anderson, WEB DuBois, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Charles Lindbergh, and Leonard Bernstein. The students did a great job!
- Walked home from Metro.
- Went to Marymount for Christmas dinner. Fun to see so many of my students.
- On Monday, G-G and I took the boys to dance class, where we spied on them as they did arabesques, plies, and something else that I can’t remember, but Seamus and Gilbert can! So cute. There’s going to be a recital in the spring, if I sign them up for this class again. I think I’m going to have to.
- Then I drove G-G to the bus station to get back to the airport, where her flight still hadn’t taken off as of 3:30 pm, yesterday. I hope she made it home.
But look–I think this would wear anyone out, but G-G had endless stores of energy. It was fun! Come back soon.
I’ll post a picture of the boys at FDR when I get to the computer with the pictures on it.
Academic Leigh Speaking 
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