World War II Planes

No shortage of cool adventures exist in our area, a true gift of being located near the nation's capital. We end up taking advantage of a small fraction of these events, largely because they can be very crowded and ultimately difficult to get to.

We did, however, make a point of heading down to the mall to visit Ed for lunch and see a recent display of World War II planes that flew over the mall on the 70th anniversary of VE day. I made this a priority given Connor's near encyclopedic knowledge of WWII. (He once had the chance to hang out with a friend of his and that friend's dad who is a military historian. They geeked out so hard on WWII trivia that they completely alienated another friend who could not have been more bored. I felt her pain, since I live with it almost daily.)

Helen does not share Connor's love of all things WWII, but she does share his love of leaving school early. She happily joined our party.

I felt a little guilty about pulling Connor out of school, because his teacher had sent a note a few days earlier asking parents to please keep their children in school. I emailed back right away letting her know we had this plan, but could cancel if needed. She knows how much Connor loves WWII. She not only agreed he should attend, she asked if he'd like to talk about what he saw later in the day! (Which was much to my delight, because presumably every word uttered about WWII to someone else is one fewer word uttered to me, assuming there is a finite number of words one can speak about WWII!)

We scored a parking spot about a block from Ed's office (thank you, congressional parking sticker!), got tossed off the nearby lawn briefly because someone left a package unattended, then finally tossed our blanket on the mall just in time to see the first of the planes start to fly over. Connor removed the binoculars from his eyes for a few moments, but not many. He was definitely loving the action. I had a field guide of the planes, but still had difficulty figuring out what plane was flying over at different times.

Upon his return to school, Connor ran into the gifted teacher and told her how he had seen his two favorite planes, neither of which I can recall right now. Even she was caught off guard by his excitement, and usually she doesn't tend to get thrown by kids being super intense about random stuff.

Elaine