National Botanical Garden--take 2--{Dec. 6, 2008}

After the Capitol Visitor's Center, we continued to brave the ridiculously cold air to take Jon's family over to the Botanical Garden for the Christmas train exhibit, which we went to last year and LOVED. The trains were outside last year, but this year they set them all up inside for whatever reason, and we were grateful for that so we could get out of the cold! Everything the trains are surrounded by and run on, (the bridges, walls, tunnels, miniature houses, literally everything) are made by natural materials (sticks, bark, wood, plants, dried leaves, you name it), and that's what makes it so impressive. They did a fairy tale theme this year, so you can see the 3 Little Pigs' houses, the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe's house, and those are just a couple of the many there.

In the atrium, they also annually set up naturally made replicas of the monuments, laid out like the National Mall, and it's soooo impressive. You may recall that Jon and I also went to this last year and blogged about it, but we had lost our camera the DAY before, and thus it all had to go undocumented by photos, and recorded only by words, while I tried really hard to learn the lesson of why sometimes it's good and important to create memories without photographing every second of what's happening. I'm sure you think I didn't learn that lesson very well based on the amount of photos we take all the time, but to my credit, I did say sometimes it's important to do things without picture taking, not always. :) But lucky for us, we had the luxury of both worlds in the end--last year without the camera to focus on the moment, and this year with the new camera to document it all.

So forgive us for all the photos, but it was kind of our make-up trip for last year's loss, so that anyone who wanted to see what they could only read last year will be able to do just that. Or at least we will in 30 years when we want to go back and remember it!