Day Five: Unexpected Dry-Cleaning Errand, Military History, Sweltering.

The theme of today's post is: terrible photography. Top to bottom, my (and 25% my kid's) barely-competent pictures depict our day, starting with the unplanned trek around downtown DC trying to locate a laundry/dry cleaner. I would be a poor mother indeed if I revealed to my readership, small as it is, that one of my kids sometimes does not make it to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I would be an even worse mother if I felt even the slightest molecule of irritation about having to spend a big chunk of a 90-degree-plus morning in downtown Washington, DC trying to find a place that will launder my aunt's comforter so that we can simply place it back in the closet so that she would never know the difference. I am completely within my rights to be annoyed at Yelp!, which misled me into thinking that a laundry was located within two blocks from where we're staying, a location which turned out to be a traffic island with no laundering capabilities whatsoev. A friendly guy at a gelateria down the block told us about Happy Cleaners, a place two metro stops distant where I had to haggle - Me! Haggle! For real! - to get the quilt clean by tomorrow afternoon. The top picture depicts us across the street from the yellow-awninged Happy Cleaners, a place which made me not-at-all-happy.

From there, off to the Museum of American History, where Ike got to try a John-Kerry-Campaign-Simulator (aka "Windsurfing Simulator") and Osk got to gratify his military history jones. And I got to visit Julia Child's kitchen (again) and fail to impress on my boys the epic radness of the J.Ch. Theme of the trip: Me launching on a fulsome speech about the awesomeness of some historical artifact or locale; boys walking away; bystanders chuckling knowingly. Wash, rinse repeat. Some of it is sinking in, however, or we would not have spent three full hours in the Museum, just looking at stuff. The kids were such troupers throughout the schlepping aspects of the morning that I not only got them McNuggets for lunch, I let them fill their cups at the soda fountain with whatever disgusting mixture they could dream up as long as they would promise to actually drink it. Hey, it's really hot outside. Dudes need to stay hydrated.