Festival of Nativities

Dan has decided to become incredibly popular & busy lately. He was asked to sing 1 solo in Relief Society, 1 solo at our ward party, 1 solo at our former ward's party, and 1 solo in Sacrament Meeting. Somewhere along the way (I'm pretty sure it was before he was asked to do all those different solos) he decided to join the stake choir. They did a 30 min performance at the Festival of Nativities last Thursday, then 2 Devotionals last Sunday (Dan did another solo at the Sunday performances, bringing the grand total to 6 if you count the Sunday performances separately).

Thursday evening I told the kids that Daddy had a performance that evening, and they surprised me by saying they wanted to go (I hadn't been planning on it)! We got there just a couple minutes before they sang, so we went right into the chapel to listen. Afterwards, I thought we'd stay for a few minutes to look at the Nativities (the gym was full of tons of them!).

Then we found the children's rooms.

We finally got going more than an hour later, past Katy & Ryan's bedtimes. They LOVED it! There was a cute little craft (baby Jesus made from a short popsicle stick with a button for a head, sitting in a condiment cup), some hands on Nativities (a refreshing change from being constantly nervous as we looked at the beautiful ones in the gym), a story corner, and - best of all - dress up clothes!

Of course, at the moment my camera has a dead battery and I have (once again) misplaced the charger. So all we have are some pretty horrible quality cell phone pictures. The room was pretty dim, which didn't help anything. At least we have something I guess!

First off we have sweet Ryan as Joseph. He stayed in this one for quite a while while playing with Nativities.

Here we have shepherd David & his little lamb, Katy.

Then I got one of all 3. And none of them look good. Oh well.

Katy actually wore 4 different costumes throughout the night, but I didn't get a picture of her as a wise man or an angel. This was the cutest by far, though. Sweet little Katy-Mary, loving baby Jesus. :)

Then we have another mediocre group shot. They had to wear hair nets under the hats, if you're wondering what's going on with Ryan's head.

All 3 of the kids had a really wonderful time. I was very impressed with the whole thing. Okay, so maybe it's just me, but you know how when you go to something like this you notice the things that should have been done differently? There was none of that here at all. It was very well done.

The next day Katy & Ryan both asked if we could go back. It went on for 3 more days...the days we had Dan's work party, our ward party (and the other ward party), and the Stake Musical Devotional. Sorry kids! We'll make sure we plan better next year and all lots of time there!

Fractions?

So I missed blogging about Halloween and Thanksgiving, and I may come back to them at some point, but I want to just get this down really fast before I take my much needed relaxing time.

I helped in both boys' classes today (hence the much needed relaxing time), and right before I left David's class, his teacher said she wanted to show me something. In math they did something for the first time where they wrote numbers in to make an equation balanced. For this one particular example, they were supposed to make both sides equal 3. So, maybe 1+1+1 on one side and 2+0+1 on the other. I guess the only other option is 3+0+0. The only other option using whole numbers, that is.

David wrote 1 1/3+1/3+1 1/3 on one side, and 1 1/2+1 1/2 on the other. Now, we talk about fractions sometimes with relation to food, but I don't think I've ever written them down for him. I certainly haven't gone out of my way to teach him. And yet, he was able to figure out and write that 1 1/3+1/3+1 1/3=3.

With all the times that child gets in trouble, it's nice to have something to pat him on the back about.