Flying high with excitement (recap of July 7)

We arrived at Ian's dad's house around 11:45 Sunday night (planning to arrive in DC ~ with enough traffic problems any day ~ at the end of a holiday weekend was perhaps not one of our best ideas...). We adults decided that a short day was in order for Monday.

We started out by visiting the office of America World. Ian and I had visited before, but there are some new people working at our agency now and it is nice to have faces to go with the voices we hear on the phone. Our next stop was to have lunch with Kristin, SuSu and their mom, Maria. We'll be seeing them this weekend at our reunion, but we decided that it was too good of an opportunity to pass up to see them on their turf. It was a challenge to get four girls to all look at the camera at the same time, perhaps a taste of things to come this weekend...

Kylie, Kristin, Caroline, and Kristin's big sister SuSu

One thing I love about this picture is that Kylie and Kristin (roommates at the SWI) have posed like this pretty much each time we've gotten together. After enjoying some good food and great conversation (with a lot of excitement about this weekend) we said goodbye to Maria, Kristin, and SuSu and headed to the National Air and Space Museum Annex. It was filled with tons of planes that were grouped according to their uses. The military planes were pretty cool, but the most exciting thing was the Space Shuttle. Ian got Kylie and Caroline squealing "Let's go see shuttle!" and for a moment you could almost imagine that they knew what they were getting excited about. Then I remembered that they are two and were running to Abby just a few minutes before saying, "We fy, we fy Mama!"

"I fyin'!"

Kylie and Caroline hadn't seen each other since October, but on Monday they fell back into a familiarity that warms the heart. Suddenly in the car rides between stops Kylie was calling both Susannah AND Caroline on her flip-flop phone!

This friendship (that Cindy and I have vowed over the years to do all we can to protect despite the distance between our families) can best be described with this picture which was what I saw when I turned back to face Kylie after reading the plaque of an interesting plane...


Considering that Kylie has recently both become very territorial of her stuff AND redeveloped a love for riding in HER stroller, I was surprised that she had insisted on Caroline riding with her! With one minor scuffle, they actually rode like this for about 40 minutes.

When we finally managed to pull Ian, Jon, and Mickey out of the museum (actually it was closing and they didn't have a choice) we let the kids put their tired feet in the fountain while we grown-ups plotted the course of the next day. The bigger kids splashed each other, but Kylie and Caroline enjoyed sitting near one another and happily kept their feet cool.


Just when we thought that they were getting along too well, this episode broke out when we finally moved to the cars ~ must be sisters...

So in the past 24 hours Kylie has seen three other girls that were on our trip to China. Two of them were what we consider "Lianjiang sisters." I found it interesting that tonight when she was getting ready for bed she asked me if we could see Darby tomorrow. Smart girl! Wow, this weekend with 10 Guangdong Gals is gonna be a blast!