Happy Birthday Miss Little Bit!!!! (and how we spent the rest of our day in DC)

One more post covering yesterday and then I'll stop babbling! Yesterday was Little Bit's 3rd birthday! We celebrated all 3 girls' birthdays on the 17th with Daddy and our neighbors. And we'll celebrate all 3 birthdays with Mama and Papa tomorrow, on the big girls' actual birthday. Yesterday Little Bit got dragged all over creation for her birthday LOL.

But I think she had an ok day overall. She had great fun running around and climbing on rocks at Great Falls (more pictures here).

After we left Great Falls, she napped while we drove to Georgetown for a quick stop at "The Old Stone House" so the big girls could turn in their Rock Creek Junior Ranger books and get their badges. They had done most of the work on Sabbath, but weren't quite done when the Nature Center closed, so they finished up at home and we took it down yesterday. Interesting bit of trivia from The Old Stone House. They had marks on the wall indicating the average height of men and women in colonial times and today, and then the heights of a few famous people. It was interesting to see, visually, how short Martha Washington was and how tall George Washington was. But the one that surprised me was Ben Franklin. I'm not sure why, but I've always pictured him as being on the short side. Not abnormally short, but average or slightly below average for his era. However, based on the marks on the wall, while not nearly as tall as George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, he was still taller than average. I'm horrible at remembering numbers, but I think he was shown as being 5'10" which was slightly higher than today's average height for men.

Little Bit continued to sleep while we drove around DC and finally found a parking spot. Our main reason we NEEDED to go down into DC yesterday was to turn in the girls' Junior Ranger books for the Cherry Blossom Festival. This year marks the 100 year anniversary of Japan giving us the cherry trees, so there  is a special Junior Ranger book just for this year's festival. Dad grabbed the books for us while we were at the zoo last week, and the girls did the work at home and while we were driving around on Sabbath. So all we needed to do was turn them in. But that, alone meant a good bit of walking.

Once we did that, we decided to walk another mile or so (thankfully Little Bit is much happier in the stroller than her sisters were. She rode almost the whole way, and MiniMe pushed the stroller almost all of it except when we were crossing streets, I insisted that a grown-up be in charge of the stroller while crossing streets, and in some stretches we were crossing so many streets, that it was easier to just keep pushing than to keep trading back and forth with her) and go to Frozen Yo.
My parents discovered Frozen Yo awhile ago and have taken the big girls a few times, but this was the first time Little Bit or I had been there. It's a frozen yogurt shop with 16 different flavors of yogurt and then a "topping bar" with several different fresh fruits as well as a variety of candy and such. You serve yourself, then pay by weight. We stick with frozen yogurt and fresh fruit. So we declared this Little Bit's birthday dessert. She was pretty ok with that LOL. I had to laugh, as we were standing in line, with me holding my own and Little Bit's and each of the big girls was holding their own, the man behind us in line (a business man getting coffee), noticed and commented on how "healthy" our bowls looked (we all had fruit piled on top, completely covering the frozen yogurt) and that his children would never go for all that fruit LOL.

So after leaving Frozen Yo we began our hike back to the car, with a stop by the Jefferson memorial on our way.

My dad wears a step-counter and based on the number of steps he "logged" yesterday, and the fact that all his walking was essentially with the rest of us, he estimated that we all (except Little Bit) walked about 9 miiles total yesterday (that includes walking out to Great Falls on both sides of the river and all our walking in DC). Not too bad for a couple of almost-9-year-olds!! (or for this out-of-shape Mommy).

So that was how we celebrated Little Bit's actual birthday!!! I still can't quite wrap my mind around the fact that she is THREE already!