When the family gets together

My parents and two of my brothers came to visit this past week. When the family gets together for a vacation it generally results in a baseball game and a rambunctious night of Uno playing. This past week did not disappoint, plus we added in a beautiful 4th of July on the National Mall.

It was so wonderful to have my family here. It was wonderful to have them all staying with us. (It was less wonderful to all share one bathroom, but we made it work.) There are so many things to do here in DC and although it seems in some ways that we barely scratched the surface we kept going nonstop and actually covered a lot of ground. Countless museums (countless if you ask Christian, although they really can be counted) Arlington Cemetery, the monuments by night, a Nats game, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the Mall, yummy restaurants and cookouts in the backyard.

My feet are a little tired today.




When we go to baseball games, we always do a little dance we affectionately called "The Daniel" and which has been in our family dance move collection since 2006. You can see more of our family dance move collection in this old post.




The Nats won.

And then there were fireworks.

 I suppose there would have been fireworks even if they had lost, but it seemed very fitting after such an exciting close game that ended in victory.



The Folklife Festival on the Mall is always a treat. This year's featured countries were China and Kenya. We had the opportunity to learn a little Tai Chi -
 

and also Tai Chi Ball, which is much more difficult than one might think.



We learned a little Chinese and also tried our hand at calligraphy -



Nils was such a show off.

We got to see so many neat artists:


Then we headed back home for a backyard barbecue -
 

Hotdogs, lots of hotdogs. If you look carefully you can see a giant platter of them in the left corner. And only like half of those were for Jeff.

Then we chased those down with some delicious blueberry cobbler, from a recipe I found here.

Then it was back to the mall for fireworks!

Saturday we went to Arlington National Cemetery and toured General Robert E. Lee's mansion, which was really neat to see.

This last picture is from Mary's conservatory, which was beautiful and made me want to start calling our sunroom The Conservatory instead. Then my mom told me that growing up they had a similar room with lots of windows and low bookcases, and they called it The Book Room. So now it is a toss up...The Conservatory vs The Book Room. Thoughts?

Anyhow, it was a wonderfully patriotic fourth of July.