09-09-09

My nephew's 1st birthday was on 09-09-09 so I packed up the kids and headed out to Baltimore. Luckily my mom was heading out there too and drove up help me wrangle kids in the airport.

My sister went with a Beatles theme based on their song #9 and also because of all the releases of Beatles stuff that day but mostly just because the Beatles rock. For the most part it was based on the Yellow Submarine. I realize that unless you have watched the movie as many times as we have the description of what we did isn't going to really make sense, but I'm going to write about it anyway. We ate sub sandwiches, black pepper (in honor of Pepperland) chips and blue (in honor of blue meanies) M&M's. She had pin the rose on the blue meanie's nose.

A strawberry fields pinata for the kids. (Side note. E cracked everyone up when it was his turn to wack the pinata. He stood underneath it and sort of just asked the pinata for candy). And an apple pinata for the adults.
Lastly we let the birthday boy tear into his yellow submarine cake. The rest of us had cupcakes.

After the party was over and we put the kids to bed. My sis, bro-in-law, mom and I stayed up to play Beatles rock band. I swore I'd never sing. I did.... and I loved it. I felt like a rock star! I may be a little addicted.

The next day after we recouped from the party we headed up to downtown Baltimore to go to a museum which turned out to be closed. Instead we went to the harbor to look at the boats. E had a little bit of a meltdown because he couldn't go on the boat (technically he could but I didn't want to pay and adult admission to accompany him). To distract him we went to the Aquarium. Luckily his 3 year old cousin ended up convincing E to hold her hand through most of the exhibits which helped keeping him corralled.

But I'll be honest and admit that he may have been carried out kicking and screaming because after a while he decided to try and explore by himself.
Friday all of us headed into DC to go to the Museum of American History. We decided to ride the Metro into town. E loved the "train". The best part was when we went underground and he thought we were flying through space. I guess he thought the lights flying past in the tunnel looked like stars. (I can't wait until he is tall enough to ride space mountain with me one day). We met up with my friend and her little boy. I didn't think things through and decided to take E to the exhibit I thought he'd like the most -- a tribute to transportation. Keep in mind the child is obsessed with boats. It took a lot of convincing to get him to leave the first boat we came to. He was disappointed when I couldn't open all the display cases so that he could play. And it would be an understatement to say he was upset when we decided to go look at other things besides boats. Picture me carrying him around the halls of a Smithsonian museum with him screaming and crying out "boat, boat, boat, boat....boat!" Luckily we managed to get him calmed down enough to see a few other things like an inventions at play, the ruby slippers, Kermit the frog, Oscar the grouch and the star spangled banner. E actually enjoyed the star spangled banner so much he wanted to go through it more than once. Maybe I have a future history buff on my hands.