Williamsburg Afterglow

One mom and six kids roadtrip to another century

Greetings,

I am spending this Saturday evening writing email after email as I dig out my inbox apologizing to everyone that it has taken me a week to reply to them between the Rosh HaShanah holiday and then a week-long trip to Colonial Williamsburg with my kids.

Seth doesn’t have a ton of flexibility at the magazine; he can only take off on weeks when they are “dark” and not publishing that week. Most of those weeks are in the summer, which doesn’t do us much good when our kids are in camp. The rest of the weeks fall during holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. And so, if I want to travel, I usually have to do it alone.

Colonial Williamsburg is one of my happy places. We’ve been going once or twice a year for the last four years. I vividly remember the first time, in February of 2020. As we walked through the cobblestone streets, I was making a $500 Instacart order with toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and food. Back then $500 Instacart orders were huge; now they’re normal (which is why I don’t use it anymore, but instead brave Costco in-person).

In December 2020, it was our first post-COVID trip, and it was so fun to have a slice of normalcy back (we still had to mask indoors and on the shuttle bus, though). It was magical walking around at the ice skating rink, strolling through the streets admiring all of the wreaths and lanterns out for Christmas.

Now in September of 2023, things there are finally back to normal.

There was so much to do that even after a day and a half in Colonial Williamsburg, we felt like we barely scratched the surface. Doing anything with kids is hard, but six kids make everything take so much longer. I timed it once and it took us 20 minutes just to make one bathroom stop. Multiply that by the number of times we went that day and I spent over an hour just facilitating bathroom visits.

That’s not counting how much time I spent looking for lost kids. My third (famously called Altima on the Internet, in honor of his birthplace) was my first runner; he had bells on his shoes as a result. Looking back, I had no idea what a runner truly was. My fourth and to some extent, my fifth are true elopers.

In the afternoon, as we were visiting the jewelry shop, my toddler (2yo) managed to slip out when the door was open. Someone popped their head into the store and asked if a redheaded toddler in a green shirt belonged to anyone there. He had run all the way down the block, and like a game of telephone, people were passing the message up the street that there was a runaway toddler, until word finally reached us. I ran to him and on my way told a group of men on a porch how I had clearly had too many children. On my way back, I discovered one of those men was “Patrick Henry” who regaled us with the tale of his seventeen children, 77 grandchildren, and 7200+ descendants. Honestly, it was just the pep talk I needed.

Then half an hour later, not to be outdone, our youngest daughter (4yo) decided she had had enough of the blacksmith, and when a stagecoach passed by, she decided to follow it. I looked around and didn’t see her, and panicked that we were so close to many open flames and she was missing. We looked in the smithery, then in the area immediately surrounding. I ended up on the street, screaming her name, in that hysterical way that moms do when their kids go missing and a woman approached me. “Did you lose a little girl in a blue dress?” YES. “She’s down in the market square. HOW DID SHE GET THAT FAR? (It’s about half a mile away). I called Seth out of breath and hysterical just so I could have someone to commiserate with. But he didn’t really understand what I was saying, just that our child was lost and that I planned to kill her if I found her. Which I did, when I saw a crowd of security guards waiting on her. They informed me that a couple found her running alongside the horses and brought her to them. She told them my name was “Mommy Bethany” and that her name was xyz (redacted because Internet) but we often call her The Queen. Tyrant, Queen, you decide.

Before we lost her, which is probably what planted the horse elopement scheme, we still managed to take a carriage ride with our favorite driver (shout out Adam!) and then take a tour of the horse stables. While we were on the tour, our carriage driver Adam gave us a used horseshoe, which we’ll be putting on our wall sometime this fall. One day we took a tour of the gardens, and the gardener put my kids to work picking all of the pole beans off of the bushes, and he gave them some seeds to plant in our garden as a thank you. We watched a show of musicians singing a few traditional songs, and at one point they pulled my daughter up to dance with them. Colonial Williamsburg is special, but the employees make it magical. We’ve been there over half a dozen times at this point, and it’s incredible how I have come to recognize the woman in the smithery, in the harpsichord shop, and in the printing shop. Whenever I chat with anyone, I’m amazed at how long everyone has been working there; I’d say the average is about fifteen years. It really speaks volumes to how the foundation operates, I think.

And now I can also say their security team is very kind. I hope I don’t keep seeing them, though.

While we were gone also went to the Virginia Living Museum (on the recommendation of an Instagram follower) and spent a day at the Yorktown Beach, and visited the Yorktown Battlefield.

I plan to write a subscriber-only post for my RightBooks4Kids Substack with suggested itineraries and book recommendations if you plan a Colonial Williamsburg adventure of your own (which you absolutely must!).

If it had been open, I would have done Busch Gardens too, but given how many times I lost kids in CW, it’s for the best it wasn’t.

While we were there, I spoke to a gathering of Republican women put together by a long-time Twitter follower turned friend. Another homeschool mom friend, whom I originally connected with on Instagram, came to hear me speak and ended up helping me juggle my kids while I talked and signed books.

I swear I have friends not from the Internet. Okay, not that many, but I do.

On the way home, we stopped at the only Kosher restaurant in Richmond, Virginia. It’s called Pop’s and it’s the strangest Kosher restaurant I’ve ever been to. It’s connected to a gambling hall and adjacent to a bingo hall, in an industrial park on the outskirts of the city. I’ve been there half a dozen times, but only at lunch, when it was dead. When I went on Thursday night (apparently it was poker night), it was hopping like I’ve never seen it. I walked through a cloud of smoke outside, through a packed gambling hall to a table. As we walked in a man asked me “How many goddamn kids you got, lady?”

As strange of an experience it is, we always enjoy the food, and my kids love how all of the (many) TVs are always set to different sports, from NASCAR to basketball to baseball.

Because of the trip, and the resumption of homeschool, I’ve not been working nearly as much. I’ve been doing Fox News @ Night almost once a week and midday America’s Newsroom appearances also. Those are always on my work Instagram account.

I also had a longer piece in Deseret about siblings being present for birth, inspired by my oldest being present at my most recent.

I have a lot on my plate this week as I try to catch up. And now that this newsletter is out, there’s nothing stopping me from moving on to it.