I love living and raising kids in Northern Virginia itself, but I also love our proximity to DC. Today I took my twin two-and-a-half-year-old boys on a trip to the National Museum of Natural History in DC. We live in Reston and so we took the bus and then the metro into the city. The boys love public transportation mostly because they get to talk to and look at other people. The always make new friends.
We usually leave our house on the 10am bus so the rush hour traffic is gone and the metro rates are lower. We rode in the front car of the train today so the boys could see the tracks and the driver until we went underground. It’s a fun vantage point. When we’re underground I typically entertain them with books that fit in the diaper bag or with pictures on my camera. Of course, they also usually talk to people.
We got off at Federal Triangle, met my brother, and walked a couple 
short blocks to the Natural History Museum. First we headed to the butterfly pavilion, because on Tuesdays, entering the pavilion is free! Normally it is $6 for adults and $5 for children two and over. Such a great deal!
The last time we visited the museum was late summer, and it was obnoxiously crowded. But January is the best time of all to visit museums on the mall. There were hardly any people there! We got to have our run of the place. The boys walked and my brother and I took turns pushing the stroller, piled with our coats. The butterflies were fantastic and bolder than last time, flying around all over, probably because the pavilion was virtually empty.
The coolest part I thought was watching huge butterflies suck juice out of a cantaloupe and pineapple. Guides hand out colored charts so visitors can look for the different butterflies and learn their names. Guides also tend to walk around with butterflies on their hair or shirts. Sometimes they have butterflies on little paintbrushes and let people hold the brushes. My boys were mostly interested in one butterfly with a torn wing. They kept telling it to take a rest and it would get better.
Next we went to the insect zoo, right next to the butterflies. It has a display about common
household bugs that the boys remembered from the summer because there is a pretend dog with pretend fleas, who scratches his pretend ear with his pretend foot when you push a button. Of all the things at the museum to be obsessed over, this is the lamest, in my opinion. The Hope Diamond is there, for crying out loud. And mummies! In the insect zoo there are so many cool bugs and they’re alive. There are even live bugs you can touch if you dare. But no, my boys like pushing the button and watching the cardboard dog scratch itself.
There were a couple workers who let you hold and touch bugs if you’d like to. One had gigantic grasshoppers from Florida, some cockroaches from Madagascar, which she claimed did not scare or hurt people because they stay in the rain forest, and bright green caterpillars.
The boys weren’t interested in touching or holding the bugs, they just 
looked at them to humor me and ran back to the flea display. There’s a place that bees come through a tube from outside and into a huge hive with a glass wall where you can see all the bees and the honeycomb. Also in the insect zoo there is a tunnel kids can crawl through like termites, a pretend rain forest to walk through, and once every couple weeks they publicly feed bugs to the resident tarantula.
We took one last look at the flea display of course, then took a snack break which involved most of a sandwich bag of Cheerios and nuts spilling across the marble floor and some minor juice box frustration. Next we hit our third and last destination– the mammal room. The boys always like looking at the stuffed animals, particularly the panda and polar bear, so we spent maybe fifteen minutes inside. By the brown bear display there are plastic molds of a brown bear paw and a polar bear claw, which the boys enjoyed holding onto.
After a quick diaper change we bundled up again and headed back up 12th street toward Federal Triangle in search of lunch. We figured a burger a couple blocks away would be better and cheaper than the museum shop’s fare. We were right. Ollie’s Trolley is a family-owned, 30 year-old cafe that neither my brother nor I had been to, though we’d passed it a hundred times. It has been voted the best burger joint in DC. Other than the fact that none of the decor can be touched, it is a cool place to take kids because it’s full of carnival antiques. There are antique popcorn machines, Coke machines, cotton candy machines and carousel horses, as well as a model merry-go-round and model Ferris wheel. There are old-fashioned kids’ rides, including a car, a boat, an airplane, and a train.
The boys enjoyed their burgers and of course their fries, which I read
have something like 26 different herbs on them. To make the experience even better, the place was still decorated for Christmas so there were lights and mini trees and fake snow to look at. We packed up and headed back to the metro and then the bus and then home. As we got off the bus by our house the boys yelled and waved and thanked the bus driver– telling him to have a nice day and a nice trip, as other passengers who had been entertained by the boys’ antics swooned and craned their necks to wave.
You can’t beat being this close to so many wonderful, free places to visit. I know my boys will eventually come to enjoy other parts of the museum more than the pretend flea-afflicted dog, which will make the trip slightly more rewarding, but I’m okay with that and their new bus friends being the hits of the trip this time. We live so close that we can be back again soon.
Want more of Dawn?
Visit Dawn at Whispers and Shouts, a local blog about living with twin boys, a husband, a lot of food, and doing it all in a condo!
