Visiting the Capitol Building

The kids went on a field trip today to see our newly renevated capitol building.  It was really quite strange to me to walk back into that building as an adult with my own homeschooled child.  When I was a kid, we spent a lot of time there while laws were being considered that would have affected our ability to homeschool.  I remember doing schoolwork in the House and Senate oberservation areas as we waited for whatever bill we were there for to be introduced and I remember sitting in committee rooms for hours.  Every year we would go down with a bunch of other homeschoolers to invite our representatives to eat a piece of pie while we showed them what we were learning and that we really were receiving an education and were normal kids.  It felt like we lived at that building some days, and so it was kinda strange to walk back in there today.  The one thing that all the time spent there did for me was to instill in me an interest in politics and how the system works and an understanding of how to use that system.  It was a very good educational tool as we learned how a bill went from a thought to being signed into law.  While I hope that the current freedoms that we have to homeschool in this state continue so that my kids don't have to sit down there for days on end as I did, I do hope to be able to use the perk of living in a capital city as a teaching tool.  Anyways...

Here are some pictures from our visit.