Michelle Obama Jumps Back Into Action -- Literally -- After L.A. Vacation

Michelle Obama is back in the public eye after a Los Angeles vacation with her mother and daughters Malia, 11 (she turns 12 on July 4), and Sasha, 9. On Wednesday morning, the first lady continued her tour of federal agencies -- now in its second year -- this time visiting the Department of Justice. After that, she headed over to a school in Washington to demonstrate her enviable rope-jumping skills while unveiling a revamped presidential fitness council.

On Thursday, while President Obama meets with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Mrs. Obama will take his wife, Svetlana Medvedeva, to the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, where students will perform a dance and music program. The two women know each other: When the Obamas were in Russia last year, they attended a performance by the Moiseyev Dance Company.

And this weekend, Mrs. Obama flies to Canada to participate in the spouse program for the G-8 and G-20 Toronto Summits, where the theme is "Recovery and New Beginnings." The last foreign travel for the first lady was in April, when she visited Mexico City and Haiti, her first solo international swing.

On Wednesday, she launched a revamped national physical fitness and sports council -- juiced up with a new focus on nutrition.

A day earlier, with no fanfare, President Obama had signed an executive order renaming the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports the President's Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition. The new emphasis is an offshoot of the first lady's anti-childhood obesity campaign, "Let's Move."

Towards that end, Obama tapped chef Dan Barber of the Blue Hill restaurant in New York, nutrition expert and author Ian Smith and pediatrician Stephen McDonough -- whose work in North Dakota includes a focus on childhood obesity -- to be part of the council, made up until now with figures from the sports world.

The co-chair appointees are New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees and Dominique Dawes, the Olympic gymnast.

"We're broadening the mission of the council so that we can make a bigger difference, focusing . . . not just what you do with your bodies, but what you put in your bodies," Mrs. Obama said. "We all know, if we're focused on our fitness, it is not enough just to exercise -- you have to focus on diet. I still struggle with that. At 46 years old, if I want to lose some weight, I can work out as much as I want to -- right, Mayor?" she said to Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty. She added that "you got to have that balance of food to really cut the fat. So we're really excited about this broader mission."

Obama was supposed to join his wife at the event, but he stayed at the White House to deal with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who resigned Wednesday over intemperate comments he made about the commander-in-chief and others in the administration in a Rolling Stone magazine interview. Obama tapped Gen. David Petraeus to take McChrystal's place as the top commander in Afghanistan.

Here's how Mrs. Obama explained the president's absence:

"As you know, my other partner, the president, was supposed to be here with us, but he had some other stuff going on. He sends his regrets. He would -- trust me, he would rather be here. But this is an important issue, and we didn't want to postpone it. So hopefully I will be a satisfactory substitution."

Mrs. Obama also helped the students at the events get in the swing by joining them in some exercise routines, including jumping rope, where Mrs. Obama demonstrated her skill.

At the Justice Department, Mrs. Obama spoke very little about her own career as a lawyer, very much de-emphasizing her experience by calling it "a little law thing."

A graduate of Harvard Law School, Mrs. Obama joined a Chicago law firm after graduation but quit to work in Chicago's City Hall for Valerie Jarrett -- now a senior White House adviser. The woman who brought Mrs. Obama's resume to Jarrett was Susan Sher -- now Mrs. Obama's chief of staff and then Mayor Richard Daley's corporation counsel, City Hall's top lawyer.

"I have to admit that I'm especially excited to be here at DOJ because we have a lot in common, many of us here," Mrs. Obama said. "As many of you know, long before I lived in the White House, I worked in Chicago, and I did a little law thing. I decided to study law for some of the same reasons many of you did. Number one, math was really hard. And as my mother said, I talked a lot -- and could write pretty good.

"But it's also because I've seen the power that law has to change people's lives in a very real and meaningful way. And I knew that lawyers had the ability to help turn words on a page into justice in the world -- to keep a neighborhood safe; to keep a family in their home; to leave our children a world that is a little more equal and a little more just."

Mrs. Obama also briefly recounted the now famous story of how she met the president. She met Obama when he was a law student at Harvard, returning to Chicago for a summer job at a law firm -- the same one a Michelle Robinson was already working at.

Said the first lady: "I met this guy named Barack Obama while [he] was studying law. Yes, he was my mentee -- a summer associate when I was a first-year associate. So that was a nice little perk from my law career."