Tuesday June 27 wet explorers

So, the one thing that went great today was changing hotels. It wasn't raining this morning when I had to load up the van with all of our stuff inside to drive to the new hotel. It took me 45 minutes to do it myself. Sarah was ready for a nap by the time I got everyone fed breakfast and myself showered, so I put her in the carseat in the van and assigned Bryce the task of sitting in the van to watch her while I ran back and forth between the rooms and the van. It was exactly 11:00 when I turned in the room keys. I got on the beltway and drove to the new hotel without any problems. It was around 11:30 with the usual checkin time being 3, so I didn't know if I was going to have to find something else to do for a few hours. I got through my list of questions and asked when the room would be ready and the manager said it was ready right then and I could go ahead and check in. So, that was nice that I could unload the van right away. Since it was still pretty early in the day I decided to go into the mall area and see if I could locate Mark at his conference to let him know we were there so we could all take the metro back to the hotel after his conference was over for the day. I evidently took the long way when we got off the metro, but at least I was successful in the end. After stopping to see Mark during a break we headed off to the mall. I was thinking we would go see the WWII memorial, but was totally confused about which direction we needed to go and we ended up heading towards the congressional building instead of the Lincoln Memorial. It was only raining lightly at this time, but the longer we were out the heavier it got. I tried to go inside one of the art museums, but after walking around the whole thing discovered that they were only letting people in the revolving doors- which the stroller was too big to fit through, so we gave up on that. We tried to go the Museum of Natural History and the Museum of American History only to find that they were closed due to the fact that they had no electricity. The electrical tunnels under the museums were flooding and they had to shut off the electricity while they tried to get them pumped out. The only museums that were open were the art museum we tried to go to, Air and Space, and the Native American museum. Air and Space and the Native American ones were too far from the metro stop at that point since we had arranged to meet Mark at 6 at the metro transfer point. We decided just to go back to the convention center and have a snack while we waited for him to finish up the meetings for the day. I bought outrageously priced, but delicious, gourmet cookies for us all in the food court and treated myself to a large latte at the coffee shop. We met Mark and headed to the metro. Sarah fussed and screamed the last 3 stops on the metro and then finally fell asleep while we were walking from the station to the hotel. Brenna had another fit a few minutes ago because she is exhausted and hungry. Mark had to go off in search of cheap food for dinner instead of just going across the parking lot to Applebees like I suggested.
Brenna just does not deal with changes to her routine very well and it showed this morning and evening with major fits. At least she behaved while we were out in DC, but dealing with her tantrums is very wearing on my nerves. Beth is balking at eating the deli sandwhich that Mark just brought back. Two more weeks of vacation is really going to wear me out, I think.