( Samurai Song )

It was my mother's birthday, so after Hebrew school we went downtown with my parents. First we went to the National Museum of Natural History's new butterfly exhibit, which was very pretty but a bit unimpressive after all the wonderful butterfly exhibits we've seen at Brookside Gardens over the years. The flowers are very pretty and it's easy to see the butterflies up close compared to the National Zoo's butterflies behind the Invertebrate House, but it's a very small, crowded space, not big and spacious like the zoo and Brookside.

We had gelato in the museum, then walked to the US Botanic Garden at the opposite corner of the National Mall to see the Alphabet of Orchids, which is also beautiful. And since we passed the National Gallery of Art on the way back to where we'd parked, we went to see In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet, an exhibit on the plein-air paintings and photography of 19th century French landscape artists. The kids were pretty fried at this point and wanting to go home and play Brawl, so I didn't get to look at much in detail, but the Corot and Rousseau paintings were gorgeous, and there were some early Monet haystacks and a couple of Renoir paintings of people among the trees.


( Smithsonian Butterflies )

I see that 10,000 BC made lots of money over the weekend despite being historically nonsensical. Although we did not see much of the animal history at the Smithsonian, after dinner, which apaulled made for my parents (Chicken Riesling, dill potatoes, asparagus, flourless bittersweet chocolate cake), we did watch Journey to 10,000 BC on the History Channel, which was very interesting...which humans arrived first in North America, how they survived a mini Ice Age, what happened to the food chain when mammoths became extinct. Then we watched the news (BBC so we could see the Spanish and Pakistani elections rather than Hillary's big-mouthed husband and Matt Damon's pregnant wife) and highlights of the embarrassing Maryland/Virginia game. And I have hamantaschen -- apricot, cherry, raspberry and chocolate -- so life is good.