International Spy Museum: Spy for a Day
At some point spies morphed in to a passion for American Girl dolls. The dolls gathered dust as she began collecting anything monkey. Monkeys were passed over for a much-requested hermit crab. The demise of the third hermit crab heralded her obsession with Limited Too and Bobby Jack clothes. With her emergence as a preteen came a love for anything and everything ipod/itunes related. As you can tell my teen is the type of kid who lives and breathes whatever it is that she is passionate about. While her love for playing spies waned, her interest in visiting the Spy_Museum in D.C. held strong. I'm ashamed to admit that while we live near DC, we are so enmeshed in school-family-activities that we don't visit the sights as often as we should. Many weekends the teen has asked to visit the Spy Museum, but birthday parties, swim meets, and volleyball games crowd the calendar. About six years ago, my then-7-year-old was all about spies. She lived and breathed spies. She was a spy for Halloween. Her favorite movies: Spy Kids 2
With schools closed for Yom Kippur, I envisioned a day filled with decluttering, household fixing, clarinet playing, and last minute homework. My husband had other plans. He suggested a day out at the National_Zoo. I knew that my 6-year-old would love the zoo (shown in photo disguised as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle). But, what about the teen? The teen has visited the zoo many times. Finding activities appropriate for a kid, a preteen, and a teen is an issue in our household. The solution: we would all drive in to D.C. together, then split up. I took the teen to the Spy Museum while my husband took the kid to the zoo. I gave the preteen the choice of which group to join. She chose the zoo. The teen LOVED the Spy Museum. So, did I. We spent over 2 hours walking around the permanent exhibition. As we entered the Spy Museum, we were instructed to read the spy biographies on the walls and choose a spy. For the duration of the visit, I was Carol Liu en route to Volgograd in search of museum papers. The teen picked a girl around her age who was headed to Dublin. We were told by a museum guard to memorize our "covers." Could we stay undercover? A computer verification of our cover stories confirmed that we were true spies. As a kid I loved periscopes, walkie talkies, and once made a phone out of tin cans. My teen and I walked from display case to display case marvelling at early bugging devices in buttonholes and hats. Today's miniscule gadgets are marvels of invention, but can you imagine lugging around the equipment carried by Cold War spies? Lunch at the Spy City Cafe fortified us for our next mission. The Spy City Cafe offered a selection of salads, sandwiches, and hot dogs, as well as scrumptious looking cupcakes. It was close to 3 p.m. I checked on the National Zoo group to see how much time we had left. Pandas and prairie dogs were still on their agenda, so the teen and I decided to check our Operation Spy. We weren't sure what we were getting ourselves in to as we boarded the elevator to the Middle Eastern city of Khandar. Our group was whisked to a briefing room to hear about our mission. I won't reveal what we did since I don't want to spoil it for anyone else, but Operation Spy was an action-packed spy adventure. I would like to thank the Spy_Museum for allowing my daughter and I to experience the Permament Exhibit -- we loved it! (I paid for admission to Operation Spy and for lunch at the Spy City Cafe). When not searching the toy box for microscopic Polly Pocket shoes or miniscule Star Wars light sabers, Jill Berry muses on raising a kid, a preteen, and a teen in the DC Metro area at Musings. This is an original DC Metro Moms Blog post.
