Presidents Day fun!

My friend from college, Charon, graciously offered to take the family to Disney on Ice. It's at the Verizon Center; Charon works for Verizon and often scores free tickets to D.C. events (like a Wizards game in January, which I would have loved to go to but Drew and I had made dinner/movie plans that night). Drew dislikes ice skating, but I said, sure! So, Rachel was wildly excited to go and we decided I'd just take her and Drew would use the morning to get a bunch of stuff done that he hadn't been able to get to yet.

Rachel and I parked for free at the East Falls Church Metro station and took the train in. It let us off a block away from the Verizon Center, so finding our seats was easy. We both had fun; the skating and music were cheesy, but I actually got into it after a while. I bought Rachel a pair of Minnie ears (her request) and some cotton candy (also her request), but other than that, she was very good about not asking me to buy her all the overpriced stuff that the Disney folks sell. At a couple of points she was dancing in her seat.

Afterward I asked her if she wanted to go to a museum and she said yes, so we stopped at Starbucks for a snack (and I ended up explaining the law of supply and demand because it was mentioned in a book she's reading, a Disney movie called "Frozen,"). Then we headed to the Air and Space Museum (her idea, thank you Uncle David!) and watched a short movie there, narrated by Douglas Fairbanks Jr., about WWI pilot movies -- a fascinating subject, as it turned out. Rachel and I examined the cockpit of a Boeing 747 and went into a couple of exhibits about the origin of flight and the pilots of WWI and WWII. We were there about 90 minutes before the museum closed, so we walked to the nearest Metro station about two blocks away, then got into the car and drove home. Drew was already making dinner and I started mixing up the batter (with Rachel's help) for Valentine's Day cookies I offered to bring to her class for their Valentine's Day celebration (postponed from last Friday). The cookies are now about to go into the oven, then I'll make pink frosting and call it a night.

There are so many things to be delighted about today -- the fact that my kid has her own Metro card and we're within a 20-minute Metro ride of all the cool things in D.C.; the fact that we can talk about all kinds of things for a whole day when I'm not worried about work or writing or the house or that I'm not volunteering enough at her school; the fact that we got out of our rut of playdates that even Rachel gets bored with sometimes, I can tell. But the real delight was the mother-daughter time we got to spend together. That was the best thing of all.