Because that is the kind of guy he is.

This last week we had the pleasure of having the la familia Mazzarella as company. We always have a bit of company but THIS company was special company. Once upon a time Marco was a missionary in Italy where he met Luciana (to the right of Marco) and Elio Mazzarella. After much consideration the young couple were baptized even though it was Italy and even though Luciana was hugely pregnant. The babe was appropriately named Marco (above dressed in red on the far right). Later came Mazzarella boy number two, Andrea (hiding to behind Marco the Younger and not named after me). Many years later Andrea was called to be a missionary in Baltimore and this week he finished his mission and was picked up by his mom, brother and his soon to be sister in law, Elisa (the darling girl with the big sale bag). Today we said goodbye and Zina blew a kiss. We PROMISED to visit them some time this year in Naples!

Here is my question. By a show of hands, how many of you still keep in touch with people you taught as a missionary? How many of you have had children named after you? How many of you can say the kid that was named after you by the person you baptized has served a mission and is getting to get married in the temple? Well, anyone? No? That is because you are not Marco Davis. This is just the kind of guy he is.

We packed the car with great care and made Xanny push them back to Italy. (He has all that four year old energy.)

Road trip: Destination Jersey

Our travels landed us at the feet of Ms. Liberty viewed here from the Jersey side of the river. This is just 15 minutes from my sister's house in Springfield, New Jersey.

Thankfully the cousins, Isabella and Max, has extra coats for my kids because it was FREEZING. I loved the idea of being chilly deep into June but Xanny wasn't too keen on the cold. Baby had been running a fever the day before and just when we got to the park I looked at Xanny and realised he was sick too. What is more fun than TWO sick kids on a solo road trip? (Look below at the last picture for the answer.)

Oh so pathetic.

On the way home from Jersey I stopped at the DANSKO shoe factory and outlet. It was a beautiful thing to walk into a backroom full floor to ceiling with cheap Danskos. I am not going to say just how many pairs of shoes I bought because I know that Marco reads the blog. But I will say that the kids shoes are to DIE for. (Marco wasn't too excited about men's clogs. What is your vote on men and plain black clogs? Are they hip and a little preppy or they only for male stewards on air planes?)

Meet Hashim, our friendly AAA guy! We LOVE Hashim because he came and unlocked our car door after I locked my keys inside at some random Exxon station in Baltimore at 7:00 pm. That is what you get when you try to road trip alone with 2 sick small children. All things considered I have to say it was a lesson learned and you can do a whole lot of really good people watching when you hang out for two hours at a Baltimore gas station.

Topiary and Princess

Here are a few odds and ends from Longwood. The topiary was like walking on a bizzare planet. I wonder if they filmed Edward Scissorhands here. (One day I will figure out how to post more than just 4 pictures at a time without wanting to commit suicide by swallowing my computer.)


You know this kid is my kid. She wanted to follow this "princess" all over the gardens. Oh wait, that was me chasing some random bride through the hedges.

It looks fake but it isn't.

Did I mention the enormous organ collection and museum housed in the ballroom of the Longwood conservatory?
(They should pay me for PR.) Later today I hope to get to the Jersey cousins pics at the Statue of Liberty.

Mussolini is a Weenie

I have to introduce this post with a Diana Nutter story. That's my mom and I have started telling my kids goodnight stories from her childhood. The most popular so far is titled, "Mussolini is a Weenie." Once upon a time there was a girl named Diana who was five years old in 1941. At that time all the houses and schools had gardens as a war effort to make sure everyone had enough food. One day when Diana Nutter was bravely fighting the bad guys as a soldier with her other five year old friends, something terrible happened. She was crawling up and down the garden rows being so careful not to be caught by the enemy or smash tomatoes. As they marched they sang, "Mussolini is a Weenie! Mussolini is a Weenie!" Just then her mean teacher named Mrs. Bigger looked out the window and saw Diana. Well, she was just sure Diana had smashed valuable WWII tomato plants during her "Operation Weenie" march. She told the whole class that no one should play in the gardens especially during a war and sent her home to tell her mother. Luckily, Diana never forgot how mean Mrs. Bigger was and told her kids all about how Mussolini was a Weenie. The End.

The moral of the story is that kids LOVE to play pretend in a garden. Longwood had a whole slue of doable kid spaces. This stuff was really amazing and it's all about scale. This is a little wickiup made of wild grapevine and surrounded in big leafy kale. It was just big enough for three little chairs and a couple of little people. It didn't provide any shade but could easily be covered in burlap or a shade sail.

This little house frame was surrounded in soon to be sunflowers that will grow up to be the walls. It looks simple until we looked closer and realized it was genuine Amish peg construction with beveled edges. We thought it would be even better if it had a willow stick roof covering the structure. It wouldn't be the same with out the weather-vane and colorful furniture. (I asked how they took care of the outdoor furniture and they said they just slap a colorful coat of paint on it every once in a while.)

There was also a section featuring lean-to kinds of play structures. The frames were solid log construction on which kids could pile up sticks and limbs. This used cheap burlap for walls and dividers. It's a great idea for a kid friendly material that last just one season. They also had lots of thin log slices to use as pathways that were light enough for a kid to manipulate yet heavy enough not to be used as a flying saw blade to be lobbed at your sister's forehead.

This final structure is definitely more of a commitment but holds lots of winter possibilities. It is an octagon constructed out of metal (a new chapter for the 3 little pigs perhaps?) with several arches for entry. The shade is provided by four different honey suckle vines growing over the top. Can you tell my museum brain is on the loose? I instantly thought of how cool this would be in the winter covered in packed snow. Our own back yard igloo might be the thing to ease the sting of moving back to Utah this fall. One thing is for sure, none of these kid's spots will work our .03 lot in DC.

Prop-BEE-ganda

Aunt Kimmy - this is for you. Longwood devotes several acres to bee education for small children. I don't know how accurate it is but the kids LOVED it. Here is the queen bee's throne. (How do they fit that thing into the hive?)

Xanny was smitten with this sign. He had to pose for several pictures with it. Click on the picture to see more Kim facts - oh, I mean bee facts.

We learned that bees really only see purple and think flowers are just fountains of joy to go play roll around inside of. Here is a what a "flower" looks like on a bee scale. I just finally got my kids naked and let them roll all around inside the fountain.

This little bug got coldy in the water. (Check out those Davis eyebrows. Move over Frida - here comes Zina.)

Ok - I am doing this in our Utah yard next year. This is Xanny running on the "Bee Boogie" path. They explain how bees communicate with each other by doing different dances. The wiggle dance says there is food far away and the circle dance says the food is close to the hive. Here they simply dug a trench and laid brick in bee path circles. (Note to Marco: I really liked this simple low matenance feature. Hint-hint.)

Oh how I love a blue table and red chairs. Tomorrow I will have to post all the outdoor kid space ideas they had at Longwood.

This just in - Civil War!

After waking Marco up in the middle of the night to discuss American History this is what I gleaned. First, the Civil War really started not because of slavery but because of tariffs issue. Once Lincoln found himself in the middle of Civil War slavery became the visceral issue. The North was in perilous danger of loosing the support of border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland and Delaware because of their agricultural dependence on slavery (or at least cheap labor.) The other Northern states were already self proclaimed "Freed states" and had no need of emancipation. Is it plausible that Lincoln bartered the alliance of critical border states, particularly Maryland because of the location of Washington D.C., with a delay in the emancipation of slaves in those states until official ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865? Maybe.

Which leads to the second point of discussion - the constitutionality of the Emancipation Proclamation. Remember that slavery is written into the Constitution. This was the compromise made to become a unified nation and a sticking point for Lincoln. Slavery was written as a constitutional right for the southern states. Once the South had seceded it was no longer part of the US and therefore not subject to (or protected by) the Constitution. At this point Lincoln could issue the Proclamation as part of going to war with a hostile nation. (Just like the US might say there can be no ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, for example.) Why would the South even care if some other country told them to no longer keep slaves? Isn't that why they seceded? What the Proclamation really did was allow slaves who escaped the South to the North to stay in the North not to be forcibly returned to their former southern slave-owners.

As for the slaves kept in border states, they had to wait for an act of Congress two years later that amended the Constitution in order to be freed. It was bummer for them but a slight perk for the land owners. This is why a victory for the North was so crucial. A loss would have possibly been followed by the southern migration of the border states to the slave owning country of Dixie and the US Capital would suddenly be surrounded by the South.

This touches on the much more current issue of Washington DC license plate tag line "Taxation without Representation". The Constitution states that the federal District of Colombia must stay independent of any one particular state of the Union for the very reason of finding its self absorbed by something like Dixie. It does not, however, say how large the District must be. Arlington was originally part of the DC but is now inside of Virginia. Some say the District should just be the Mall area from the Capital to the Lincoln Memorial. Others say DC deserves the same number of senators as any ordinary state. Additional Representatives in the House was just voted on and approved in House and still waits for Senate approval.

The deal is if DC gets a house seat so will Utah. It's a solid democratic seat for a solid republican seat and will therefore keep the balance of power. But Bush has said he will veto the measure. Utah stands to gain another congressional seat anyway after the next census of 2010 and then the Republicans get a seat with out having to give the Democrats one for DC. For any of you return missionaries from Utah who were serving missions during 2000 this has everything to do with YOU. The issue came about when the census counted the service persons from South Carolina living out of state as instate residents. That boost gave South Carolina population sufficient for another House seat. (I think it is one rep. per 100,000 citizens.) At the same time the feds failed to allow the 40,000 Utah missionaries living outside the state of Utah to be included as instate residents in the count and therefore, skipping Utah when they were dishing out servings congressional seats. The DC-Utah alliance was the compromise law makers came up with to deal with the obvious injustice.

This is as much as I could understand in the middle of the night on the subject/s. It may or may not be completely accurate. But hey, it's the Internet so I can write what ever I want.

Discuss.

Emancipation?

Our house is just around the corner from Lincoln Park which was intended to be the geographic center of DC by design. When the capital was built, what is now the Mall was a swamp covered by the Potomac. This is the monument to Lincoln that was commissioned by freed slaves, the first of which was Charlotte Scott - a freed woman of Virginia. She donated her first $5 earned in freedom. Below is a plaque that explains that all funds were contributed solely be emancipated citizens of the United States by his proclamation January 1, 1863.

Two things here strike me as "post-worthy" regarding the accuracy and design of park's monument. The first point pricked my interest when I came across the Currier and Ives lithograph, Freedom to the Slaves, found in the National Portrait Gallery. It points out that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 declared freedom only to those slaves in the eleven CONFEDERATE states that had seceded. Contrary to what the plaque says, emancipation in the United States didn't happen until 1865 when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified. Is it common knowledge that the Emancipation Proclamation didn't free all slaves? Was I just not listening that day to Dr. Fox during American Heritage? (BTW - I haven't talk to Marco about this yet. He would know all this backwards and forwards. What, just because he has taught Constitutional Law means he has all the answers? Pretty Much, yes.)

Discuss.

The second, and much more obvious issue, is how both 1860's images belie a Victorian view of freedom for the slaves. Both show Lincoln towering over a subservient, kneeing "freedman". His gesture is hardly the stance of empowerment and emancipation. Discuss.

What ever the initial intent of the memorial was, I don't think Charlotte Scott envisioned our every day Lincoln Park scene -- 60 year old gay couple and their 5 dogs. (I love this city.)

Discuss.