Family Fun: Downtown DC and Dinner Party

 Summer is a great time to live near DC. Our friends often come see the sites and luckily include us in their visit.  This week my oldest childhood friend was in town with her family.

 We met up with them at the American Indian Museum and went straight up to the awesome kidzone.

The igloo building station was open again!

 Then we headed over to the Museum of Natural History to see the T-Rex (and other cool things).

Saturday evening they came to our farmette for dinner. Since 2 of them have celiac disease we had lots of salads, chicken spiedies, shish kababs and everyone, even the kids(!), gobbled them up. 

 

 

Family Fun: Waiting for a New Cousin

 We had a couple of rainstorms this week. Theodore found a dry spot.

 Then he got pushed around by some kids who love playing with him. We are lucky he is such a good sport.

 The cousins spent a day and a night at our house while waiting for baby O to be born.  E was practicing holding baby dolls in preparation for meeting her new baby sis.

S and cousin L were big pizza making helpers.

Saturday morning they had a lot of painting ambitions and set to work creating their masterpieces.  

Then we went to a birthday party Saturday afternoon and their were more painting activities.

Magnet blocks are a popular family activity.  We had a 100 piece set last July and as of a few days ago they could only find 50 of them. They want to get more to enlarge their set, but I told them that they needed to find at least 70 of the old ones. I guess 50 is not bad considering how much we moved around in the last year.

 

Home Work: New Knobs and Refinishing the Dining Room Table

Visitors be warned: 

Houseguests frequently get put to work on whatever project we are in the middle of! 

This week we took advantage of Grandpa J's experience carving wooden sculptures to help us with refinishing the dining room table. We spent several hours sanding. 

We tried to find a cabinetry maker who would let us put it through the planer, but no one a). had the right width, and if the did then b). they did not want to put anything through it that they had not made themselves.  After about 6 hours we had all the old finish sanded off.

We sanded the underside of the table top with fine sandpaper and then started testing stains.  I was looking for either a dark walnut color or a golden natural color.  Those are the two colors that we already have in the dining room.

The first stains we tested were valspar's ebony, kona, and dark walnut:

 We tried minwax weathered oak, valspar weathered gray, minwax dark walnut, provincial, jacobean, and dark walnut with weathered oak over top.  ALL look quite orangey... these boards are reclaimed lumber from a salvage yard.  I think they might actually be redwood, not pine.

This section has kona layered over with gray, classic grey (opaque), minwax dark walnut layered over with gray, weathered oak, and valspar navy.  Grandpa John advised us that cool blue or gray could help cancel out the orangey-ness, which it definitely does, but some of the grain on this softwood just does not want to absorb much stain.

 I am still not satisfied that we have the right combination.  Tomorrow I will try a kona-ebony mixture and also just applying the clear varnish to the natural wood.  I keep saying "just one more try and then I will give up"... still trying things though.

The knobs redo in the kitchen was much more straight forward and I love how it looks.  The darker knobs tie everything together and are soooo much more my style.  When we moved in all the cupboards and drawers had these silver knobs. They just blended into the wood and didn't add much.  Here is a listing picture:

We put cup pulls on the drawers and these dark iron knobs on the cabinets.

Here is picture of the new style.  I need a cleaner kitchen and a better camera to take a panorama. But you get the idea.  Lovely!

Family Fun: Grandparents Visiting

Grandma S and Grandpa John stayed with us through Thursday.  They joined in the fun for cousin B and JJ's birthday party at the Monster Mini Golf.

 The golf course is all lit by black lights with scary monsters along the way.  Cousin L had her birthday their awhile back.  

 

 My kiddos favorite part of Monster Mini Golf is this claw machine. The party package comes with a bunch of arcade money cards.  This claw machine lets you play until you win something. It's full of rubber ducks!

The kiddos traded their tickets from the arcade for little prizes. These teeth were so funny.

Baby L had a few milestones this week.  These funny pictures show the results of the first. She learned how to put pants on herself! Once she got the hang of it she just wanted to keep going. She has 4-5 pairs on here.

 She also cut 3 teeth -- 2 molars and one bottom tooth. She had some very grumpy moments in the stroller and in the car.

 At home she is pretty chill and gets her way a lot.  She loves to play with the boys car ramps. She can entertain herself for a long time in the playroom with all the toy drawers. She is also very tidy.  She likes to help me put things in the washer, close up cupboards, and bring out food from the pantry.

 Tuesday we worked on projects all day, including refinishing our dining room table, more on that in the next post.  Then the crew,  minus L and I, headed off to see the Orioles play the Red Sox at Camden Yards.

 

Wednesday we went downtown to see some art galleries. Big brother S giving L hugs on the metro:

First stop, the newly reopened Renwick Gallery.

The current exhibit is called "Wonder".  It was pretty amazing.

These nests are called Shindig by artist Patrick Dougherty

 The rainbow thread sculpture was similar to the one we saw at the BYU Gallery, both were done by artist Garbriel Dawe.

 These towers are made of hundreds of thousands of stacked index cards stacked by artist Tara Donovan.

 

 This one was done by Janet Echelman. You are supposed to lay on the floor and watch the colors shift and change in the handwoven net as it crosses the 100 ft space.

 

We passed by the White House on our way to the National Gallery of Art. Hot kids don't look too happy.

Huge fountain in the rotunda of the National Gallery of Art:

 We did not spend any time wandering around this massive museum.  I asked the kids which artist (of those they had studied) that they wanted to go see the paintings from - Van Gogh and Mary Cassatt - and we went directly to those exhibit rooms.

 Here is A with the painting that she liked the best:

 And brother M with his favorite:

That was true until we passed by a school group that was talking about this painting.  We learned that it was based on a true story where the noblemen lost his leg, survived, was proud of his courage, AND had the shark added to his family crest!  Then this painting became their favorite.  From wikipedia: 1778 oil painting by American painter John Singleton Copley, depicting the rescue of Englishman Brook Watson from a shark attack in Havana, Cuba.