We had a great day and a great outing today--and believe me, we were WAY overdue. During the week it has seemed to get harder and harder to get out of the house to explore someplace new. But things just went along well today... and things went clickity clack... things just snapping into place.
We left as soon as Phoebe woke up from her morning nap, planning on having lunch at our destination. Our destination was (drumroll please) the National Gallery--- ambitious, very ambitious. I had been there childless when my friend Leigh was in town, and they have a great exhibit going on right now called Manet to Picasso. It is a small and managable collection but chock full of some big famous works, and I thought it would be the perfect exhibit for the kids. When I was there earlier with Leigh, I picked up about 10 or so postcard of my favorite works from their outstanding Renaissance collection and from the exhibit we were headed to. Mary-Mae was really into the postcards... looking at them, painting them, coloring picture to look like them.. etc. A REALLY cool thing happened! We had FUN, real FUN at the museum. You need to "cut through" some of the Renaissance rooms to get to the wing where the exhibit was. My plan was to quickly go through and not overwhelm them and even look or talk about them... but Mary-Mae asked,
"Can we see the painting that you brought home on the postcards?"
.......UM YEAH!
We would walk into a room, and she would instantly recognize a work of art, and say "THERE!" and go over!!!
George as a whole, actually enjoys looking at art as he is more mellow, and will just occasionaly point to things and say "I LIKE that one, Thats cool. Do you like it?"
She did a really great "copy" of Jan Van Eyck's "Man with Red Turban", I said would you like to see the Man with the red turban. She nodded eagerly. We headed from the Italian rooms to the German, they have the Van Eycks in a small room that has one entrance/exhit.. so it tends to be a bit crowded and jumbled in there... but it was cool to see the crowd mobbed around The Arnolfini Portrait, and explain to here why they were all there. The crowd I think helped her to get that it was a big deal.
We headed to the exhibit, and at lunch we had talked about how we were going to pick out some of our favorite painting... I told them that some people like works because of thier colors, the subject, or the way they make you feel. When I was in college, I was OBSESSED with the drama and beauty of the Italian Renaissance, so feeling a biggie for me.... George and Mary-Mae both picked out ones they liked... big props to my Dad here.. AND to George for noticing the similarities, he thought the piece by Seurat called The Channel of Gravelines looked a lot like the painting my Dad was working on last summer.....

We ended up buying the brochure of the entire exhibit, some paper and some water colors, and have been painting this afternoon.

The weather was great today and after the gallery we headed out to trafalger square and let Phoebe and the kids run around in the sun, after that we headed home....

Click clack.. I LOVE days like this!