Mrs. Trump visits Brussels children’s hospital, art museum

BRUSSELS — Melania Trump joined the spouses of other NATO leaders visiting a children’s hospital and touring a Brussels museum on Thursday.

Mrs. Trump worked through moments of awkwardness and language barriers to help ailing children make flowers out of crepe paper. “So beautiful,” she told them. They shared opinions on books, movies and favourite flowers — she said hers include orchids and peonies.

Children have been a theme of Mrs. Trump’s trip, her first to Europe as the president’s wife. She visited a pediatric hospital in the Vatican and participated in a forum with Belgium’s Queen Mathilde on protecting children from online exploitation.

The outing of NATO spouses, which took place away from a summit of member nations, included a museum dedicated to Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte, best known for his “This Is Not a Pipe” painting — of a pipe. Magritte made a career of juxtaposing contradictory images — showers of bourgeois clerks in bowlers raining down on drab Belgian streets, or huge apples suffocating in claustrophobic living rooms.