We live in a small town that is just over an hour outside of D.C. Although our town is beautiful and has history and charm we are lacking in quite a few things that I, as a mother of four, find important. Things like a pediatric dentist, a dermatologist, decent family restaurants (we have a couple of fast food places, and a few expensive adult places) and well frankly, Costco. So every two weeks we take a trip into “town”, about a 30 minute drive, to go shopping and eat. We bring any of the kids that care to join, usually they decline. My kids think I am crazy when I load two coolers into the trunk of the car, knowing that one will never be enough. Usually we head straight to our favorite import from Utah (can you say Cafe Rio!?!) for a yummy lunch before we hit Costco and stock up. This past week we had an unexpected stop on the way there.

Unexpected Spring Break Fun

All of my kids were out on Spring Break this past week so we decided that going to town would be a family trip so that everyone could get out of the house. A couple of the kids were less than thrilled but I decided long ago that pleasing everyone is impossible, so we just do the best we can and make the majority happy.

On the way to our lunch spot we drove past one of the largest cemeteries that I have seen in a while. My husband decided to turn in and park so that we could walk around a little before lunch. This particular cemetery dates back to the 1600’s! My son wanted to see how many names of his friends he could find (um, okay, morbid much?). My girls wanted to look for old graves and decided that the first person to find a bone (WHAT?!?!) would be the winner.

We found quite a few interesting graves. For example: the name on this grave is Simon S. Simmons. And there were three other matching graves all with the same name.

I explained to my kids that many people name their first son after the father and so on to keep the family name going. Still, Simon S. Simmons?

This cemetery also had rows and rows of really old graves from a battle that was fought close by. The old headstones are fading and breaking so they are replicating the stones and placing them with the old stones. It was really eye-opening to my girls who are studying US History in school to see just how many people died in one battle.

I looked up at one point to see my son pretend sobbing sitting next to a headstone. I walked over to him to see why he was so “distraught”. If you know him you could understand why he was so upset. I can fully understand his feeling for this death:

The last thing we saw, or maybe the thing we saw that gave us that last push to leave was this grave:

If you look closely, you can see that someone, or something is trying to dig its way out!

Not really, but with kids that LOVE to hate zombies this was a way to make them laugh and run to the car. It also sparked a conversation about best Zombie Apocalypse weapons, but that is best kept for another post.

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