Natalie's Very Merry Christmas

Natalie was lucky enough to have some fun events during the Christmas season. The biggest event was her first violin recital! She had only been taking lessons for about 5 or 6 weeks before the recital. We were so proud of her and the older, more accomplished violinists were so sweet and she got a lot of applause after her lovely rendition of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". She was definitely the youngest (and cutest) one playing that night. I'm just a little biased. I need to get the video on here because it is priceless. She was so excited and had a HUGE smile when she was finished.

Isn't she cute? I only wish I had my better camera. . . .

The first grade classes at Natalie's school have a gingerbread party tradition each year. It began with a cute little Christmas "concert" of 3 or 4 songs including "O Tannenbaum" sung in German and "All I Want For Christmas is my Two Front Teeth". Natalie is in the front row in the red - wearing the Santa hat.

Afterwards we went back to the classrooms to help build "gingerbread" (or graham cracker) houses. The children got to decorate the houses later in the week at school when the frosting had hardened.

Natalie loves Mrs. "B" (o:

Our Tuesdays were insane in December. They are my youth nights and Freddy*, who is our ward financial clerk, had to be at church three nights a week for tithing settlements, including my youth night. Add to that, the fact that the above events were both on Tuesday nights and we had a pretty crazy Tuesday almost every week. One of the nights, Natalie found one of her primary teachers in the foyer, Brother Baxter. She loved her teachers - Brother and Sister Baxter. They were the sweetest teachers and took such good care of Natalie. Brother Baxter always got a little teary eyed whenever he talked about Natalie or the other cute kids in their class and how much he loved them. He always pointed out exactly what qualities made each child special and and he and his wife always went the extra mile for their lessons. They are the sweetest people. We were so grateful Natalie got to have such loving teachers. Notice in the picture above also that Angela looks like an orphan. I realized when we got home that the jammie bottoms she was wearing were size 2! (o; HA! And she has a huge hot chocolate stain on her jammie top. My girls love coming to young women's with me, but it gets a little chaotic.

Natalie loves to "cook" by herself. She loves to chop up her own fruits with our kid safe knives. She made this colorful fruit snack one day after school all by herself. She's always coming up with inventions of "recipes" she would like to try. They always include her favorite ingredient - some kind of fruit.