I'm so proud of my little girl. She had the option today of going to church with her four little friends here or going into the District to the National Gallery to look at paintings with Ed and me. Guess which she chose? Not that I don't want her to go to church (we go every week) but I was very impressed that instead of choosing to be with her little friends and to go to their children's program and hang out with them, she practically begged us to go see the paintings--the *real* paintings.

I don't know if I've mentioned before Joey's artistic ability, but she is very talented. She has taken art classes and her teachers have all told me that her skill and ability are that of a much older child. And she loves drawing more than almost anything in the world. Every morning before school, she usually gets up and draws for 30-60 minutes before we have to get ready and go to school. And then she draws when she gets home. Ever since she was quite small, we've read from Mike Venezia's series of books called Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists. We have about 25 of them and read them all the time. Her favorite artist of all time is Frida Kahlo because she is a woman and she is half Mexican which is the same at my little Joey. Next to Kahlo, she loves Picasso and Van Gogh (her first two favorite artists), Diego Rivera, Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edward Hopper and Edgar Degas. She has read about lots of others, though, and recognizes pieces from her books. It was a real treat to stand in front of Girl with a Watering can and Girl with a Hoop, two famous Monet paintings, and study them in all their original glory. She loved seeing Picasso's cubist paintings and some paintings from his blue period and his rose period. She loved the giant Jackson Pollock splatter paintings and the funky Andy Warhol paintings. We were able to see originals from all her favorites except Kahlo and Degas. There are no Mexican artists represented at the National Gallery. (A travesty, if you ask me.) It was a wonderful, wonderful afternoon. We also some some incredible paintings from 19th century Realists from Berlin that were on loan at the Gallery. Those really knocked our socks off. And Joey would study them very carefully looking at all the impressive detail. She definitely has the patience and attention span to be an artist.

We ate lunch at the cafeteria in the National Gallery and it was the tastiest cafeteria food I've ever had. Joey had pepperoni pizza but Ed had this incredible pizza with a pesto base and topped with chicken, onions, goat cheese and pine nuts. We all loved that. I had delicious cold poached salmon with dill sauce and some mixed greens with a wonderful balsamic vinaigrette that was good on the fish, too.

After our tour of the National Gallery, we drove around past the White House, the Washington Monument, the Lincold Memorial and then stopped at the Jefferson Memorial. While we were there, the President's helicopter flew toward the White House and then about 15 minutes later, flew back toward the Air Base.

The last wonderful thing we did in the District was to drive to the National Cathedral. It is on Massachussetts Ave. which is also known as Embassy Row--or one of them--and saw lots of embassies from lots of countries, large and small. And we saw great architecture on town houses and brownstones. They were beautiful! But the cathedral was breathtaking. It is the 6th largest cathedral in the world and is the last pure Gothic structure ever built. It was begun in 1902 and finished in September of 1990! It has magnificant flying buttresses and spires and rossettes and stained glass. It is built in the shape of a cross, as most cathedrals are, and it seats a darn lot of people. We came in just at the tail end of mass and walked around the edges while things were finishing up. I loved being in there. After the service, the religious guys came down and the head guy shook our hands. He asked how we were and I said we were good. He said, "Swell. That's just swell." It cracked me up. We walked up to the choir loft where the services are actually performed (very different from the church services I usually attend) and studied the incredibly ornate wood carvings and crucifixes and altar and stuff like that. Then they started an organ recital and we listened to it for a few minutes. The organ and the acoustics were so gothic. There's no other way to describe it. The organist played Bach's Fugue in D Minor (I think that's the one--it's used a lot in old scary movies, like Phantom of the Opera) and it raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

After taking some pictures outside, we drove through Georgetown which is very quaint but very congested, even at 5pm on a Sunday afternoon. It took longer to get through Georgetown than to get from Georgetown to our friend's house in Virginia.

After dinner, we took a nice hour-long walk along the bike trail for our evening constitutional (and to wear the kids out so they'd go to bed at a decent hour). All but my Joey went to sleep by 9pm. Joey couldn't sleep and didn't go to sleep until 10pm. But that's not as late as you might think--her usual summer bedtime is 9:30.

This has been a wonderfully satisfying day. I love days like this. Tomorrow we are going to the Museum of Natural History (one of the Smithsonians) and then leaving for the Lake House so my internet access will likely be gone for a few days or a week or so until we get to Ed's brother's house in St. Petersburg unless I can find a computer before then.

--A very relaxed and happy L