A confession: I'm afraid of heights.Okay, well maybe not AFRAID-afraid, but when I get to a high place my knees start tingling and my neck gets a weird tense-as-a-brick feeling. So I don't choose to climb up to high places much. But I'm in New York City. Home of the High Places That Make Your Knees Feel Weird. ;-) And I don't ...
travel
Today
Jonathan was only five years old when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occured in 2001. We didn't have tv then either and chose not to tell him or Lucy (who was 8) about the attacks. We would tell them later, we decided. When they were older and we could better explain the presence of evil in our world. There would come a day we'd recall the ...
Energy Crisis
I don't think I could live in this city. This "...city that never sleeps."I'm an extrovert. I get my energy from people and my surroundings. And trust me, New York has A LOT of energy. (And I have enough trouble sleeping in my own bed in my own sleepy part of the Bubble, but that's not important right now.) But we're ...
Give me Liberty… or give me Cuban food!
We got up early this morning to board the ferry to Ellis Island and Liberty Island - where the Statue of Liberty lives. ;-) We waited in line for over an hour to climb the Lady's Pedestal and visit the museum there. By the time we descended, we were tired and hungry. That crazy kind of exhausted-from-all-this-non-stop-monument-viewing hunger. ...
How random is my life today?
We spent the morning touring Mt. Vernon - the home of George Washington in Alexandria, Virginia. In the afternoon, we visited the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. We just made a quick stop at a Rest Stop/Food Court off the Turnpike somewhere in Delaware. (Okay, so this last stop kind of weirded me out a little. Well, actually...a lot...but ...
No ‘Flux capacitor’ needed
Memory is a funny thing. It can be triggered by a smell, a sound, or (for us visual people) something we see.So here we are in Washinton DC navigating around the Smthsonian museum complex and dodging all the other school groups that are here at this time of year. The Air and Space Museum was fascinating. (Actually, ALL of the Smithsonian museums ...
Capturing their imaginations
Education at home is not me filling my children's heads with facts as much as it is me "teaching" them how to learn.My educational goals for them have more to do with getting them to love learning as opposed to filling their heads with facts they can parrot back to me immediately but not retain in the long run. Today we visited the ...
Where else would a Cuban be on Mother’s Day?
Happy Mother's Day! We began our day with a visit to Arlington Cemetery and some of the kids in our group (congratulations, Jessica!) got to participate in the Wreath Laying Ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.So I'm moved and emotional and in a fragile and contemplative mood as we slowly walk back to our tour bus. There are many ...
National Treasures
We're having such an amazing time touring Washington DC, but we have. not. stopped.Today we visited: - The World War II Memorial. That deserves an entire post of its own. - The White House Tour (which totally made me want to design my own china but that's not important right now). =D - the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. A massive ...
A-maze-ing
We landed in Norfolk, Virginia yesterday around 5 pm and hit the ground running with the first of many historical tours. After an entire day flying from left to right (=D) and a quick dinner we took an evening tour (by lantern and candlelight. Wow! Just wow.) of Colonial Williamsburg. We went back today for another handful of tours and I completely ...
