Sunday 6th. Thermometer at 14 in the Morning—21 at Noon And 19 at Night. Notwithstanding the Wind blew fresh all night, the River was quite closed this Morning and the Ice on the flats hard, and sufficiently thick to bear a Man.
The Major & his wife, recommenced their journey to day, aided by a pair of my horses to take them over the worst of the roads.
George Augustine Washington was to return to Mount Vernon from this trip some time in February, but Fanny, who was now about six months pregnant, planned to remain at Eltham until she had her child. “Her ill luck with her first child,” Martha Washington wrote Elizabeth Willing Powel 18 Jan. 1788, “is the only reason of her wishing to change the place of her laying inn this time, If her child lives, it will be sometime in may before she can come up, and the distance is two farr for me to goe down to see her.” Fanny was, Mrs. Washington confessed, “as a child to me, and I am very lone some when she is absent” (ViMtvL). For Fanny’s first child, see entries for 10 and 25 April 1787.