Day Two in DC: The Museum of Native American History

While the kids were pretty good for us, it turns out it's still a liiiiittle bit of a handful being in a hotel room with people on several different schedules, but we still made it out of the hotel in decent time and had already plotted our course for the day.

Since the Capitol building was right across from our first stop, we stopped to stroll around a little and snap a picture.  Unfortunately, that reflecting pool was also torn up for construction, so this was the best we got.  It's a lot bigger than I thought it was, for some reason...

This museum was pretty neat, I liked the set-up.  Inside and out, it reminded me of the Guggenheim in New York City.  There seemed to be a lot of different cultures represented there, many tribes I'd never heard of.  There were lots of interactive screens in the different small exhibits where you could get more detail on particular aspects of that tribe.  Someone in our party got particular enjoyment from those screens...

They also had several different set-ups of many, many examples of different common objects throughout all the tribes and times represented.  I thought it was neat to see them all together like that.

Another random fact about my genealogy: my great-great-great-grandmother was a Cherokee Indian.  She was won in a poker game.  She was my great-grandfather's grandmother and while Kendra's blonde hair and blue eyes don't exact suggest that it's in her DNA, you could definitely see it in Grandpa.  So I was excited to see that the Cherokee were represented at the museum and carefully read and watched everything in that exhibit.

This is just the sign at the entrance, there was more too it than this.

At one point in our viewing, I went to the bathroom and left the kids with Grant so I could do it without them.  This is what I found when I was finished:

 

Like father, like son?

There was a pretty neat interactive area for kids where they had all sorts of different things you could do to get the hands-on experience of a few aspects of the different cultures.  Kendra really liked the kayak.

There was also a life-size tepee but my shot was so limited you probably couldn't gather that just looking at the picture.  I actually got a couple of other pictures, but for some reason I feel weird about posting pictures of children I don't know on my blog...

And Elliot did was he does best...just be a lovable, adorable ball of goodness for the whole world to enjoy.

There was a fantastic view of the Capitol building out the window of the children's area, it was pretty neat to see from up high.

There were also several pretty neat statues throughout the building--Kendra really got into shouting at the top of her lungs pointing out the names of the different animals she saw on them.

Not a bad way to spend a morning, if you ask us.  We heard the cafeteria in the basement is one of the better ones in the Smithsonian because it features native food, but it was still pretty early when we were ready to make our next stop, so we opted out.  Maybe next time...