Holy mackerel.....

....Just one of the phrases we heard on our 3rd and 4th grade field trip to the Massachusetts State House today.  Richard and I are resting - exhausted! - after helping to shepherd forty excited children from classroom to subway to state house and back again through Boston's best slush and ice.

Tom has to write a few paragraphs on his trip for tonight's homework. Here's my version.

Massachusetts politicians are Very Proud of beating the Brits. They also spent a lot of money on their State House. It has lots of  marble statues. The statue of George Washington shows him wearing a Roman toga, but there was a fuss because people in Boston didn't want him to think he was a king or anything, so everyone agreed that this is officially a blanket. The State House has an awesome dome. It started as wooden shingles but they had to be fixed a lot. Then they tried copper, but it went a funny green colour. So they spent more money put on gold leaf but do you know that all that gold is spread so thin, the whole lot only weighed five pounds? 

The Massachusetts State House has a Representatives chamber and a Senate. The Representatives chamber was in business, and the men outside shushed us a lot. So here we are in the Senate. You can see our teacher Jen is standing at the front. 

The Representatives used to sit in here and they had a sculpture they loved, which they called the Sacred Cod. When they moved to their new room, they took the Sacred Cod with them. The Senators were upset, because they wanted it. So someone gave them their own fish, which hangs above the chandelier and it is called the Holy Mackerel.

(My mum says the pictures are skew wiff because she wasn't supposed to be taking them...)

At the end of our tour we met our own senator from Cambridge and had to sit still for group photographs. This is my mum's version but there'll be a proper one later from the real photographer who made us all count to three and then shout "Money!"