DC Must See: National Cathedral at Sunset

Saturdays are all about packing in as many things as we can into the shortest amount of time possible. It’s exhausting. If I listed everything we did today, you’d feel tired. Wanna see?

• Girls’ dance class
• Trip to Target
• Family Fun Day at a potential school for Zana
• Quick lunch at a Metro 29 Diner
• Summer camp orientation for Lira
• 6-year-old’s birthday party
• Visit with a friend traveling through town
• Evening visit to the National Cathedral
• Outdoor dinner and gelato at Pete’s APizza (that’s not a typo)

I told you!

I’m not sure why we live our lives this way, but we do– every single weekend. Some of the things on the list are repeats: We’ve been going to the same dance studio every Saturday for the past three years.

Birthday parties (as we all know) are a weekly occurrence; in it’s a miracle we were only invited to one this weekend (it’s a curse being so gosh darn popular). Pete’s and 29 Diner are two of our local standbys.

But things like tonight’s sporadic trip to the National Cathedral to watch the sunset are why I love living in DCity.

We are so blessed (you know, because we’re at a cathedral)  to have these opportunities right in our back yard. I remember coming to DC from Texas, as a kid. My parents dragged us to every monument and every museum (mostly against our will) during our 3-day weekend trips. And it wasn’t until I was older that I appreciated any of it. For my girls, it’s different. We go to the WWII Memorial, the Washington Monument and the Smithsonian Museums like some families go to Wal-Mart. They don’t think it’s a drag; it’s just what they’re used to doing.

When we got to the cathedral tonight, the doors were closed. The girls were disappointed because they wanted to see the stained glass windows and the sculpture of Darth Vader in the west tower (I’m not making this up). But they got over it pretty quickly when they figured out there was so much open space– a full  57 acres– around the “castle” where they could run around. Lira learned to hula hoop (seriously, she learned today at the cathedral), Zana pretended to be Rapunzel and “let down her hair” from a “tower” she found, and Dave perused the parts of the cathedral that had broken off in last year’s earthquake. I enjoyed the hydrangeas and the endless photo ops.

We watched the sun set and then walked, barefoot, back to our car. Everyone felt a little tired, a little hungry and very satisfied. I wonder where tomorrow will take us…