Ballet and Tap Lessons

For Christmas Tori received this adorable ballet outfit from her Great Grandma and Grandpa and we gave her dance lessons. She was soooo excited for her first ballet/tap lesson. Here are two pictures of her right before her first lesson.

Below is a picture of the little dressing area at the dance studio where she has her lessons. She loves the little cubbies to put her clothes in.

During the lessons her teacher (Miss Megan) has a curtain over the window where they are dancing so the kids don't get too distracted by seeing their parents through the window. We all still peek through the little slits in the curtain during most of the lesson, though. :)

When Grandma Katie came to visit we tried to take a few pictures (it was a little hard trying to do it through the curtain and with the glass, but I think some of them are really cute).

Below Tori is holding one of the flowers they get to pretend with and do lots of cute little moves.

Below they are sitting in a circle with Miss Megan - who Tori loves.

Half-way through their lesson they come out to the moms and change into tap shoes. Every time Tori comes running out and gives me a huge hug and says, "I'm having so much fun!"

They have a ton of fun dancing to music and with pom-poms in their tap shoes.

As you can see by the two pictures below Tori is quite mesmerized by the one wall that has the mirror on it. She is usually always doing what the teacher tells her(by watching Miss Megan's reflection in the mirror), but as the lesson goes on she gets further away from the group and closer to the mirror.

New Hair Cut and other pictures

So I finally took Tori to get her haircut for the first time. Here are a couple pictures of her right afterwards (it may not look that much different, but before it was cut it went pretty much all the way down to her waist). She had a little bit of a hard time sitting still, but she was so happy to have it cut. She hates having her hair done and even now every time I have to comb out a tangle she tells me we need to cut her hair even shorter.

This is just a cute picture of what Tori calls her "fuzzy sweater" that she got for Christmas from Grandma Katie and loves to wear on these really cold days.

This is a picture of Claire, Tori and Lauren dressed up as princesses on New Years Eve. Life is so much more fun when you are in a fancy dress. :) That would be a fitting motto for Tori.

Snow!

So it's been a very snowy and VERY COLD December and January here. We have still managed to have some fun playing in the snow. Above: Amy is pulling Cooper and Luke on the sled and Tori is in the purple. Tori loves going out to play in the snow and getting pulled on her sleds (I really need to try and find a hill around here for her to sled on - easier said than done.)

Here are some pictures of Tori and Dad making a snowman (Tori loved doing this, since mommy usually doesn't have the patience to try and build one). Making a snowman here is a lot more difficult than it was back east for me. Around here it is so cold and the snow doesn't have much moisture to it so it is very hard to pack.

After we made the snowman we had a hard time thinking of what to use for a face, so we got creative. We did have a carrot for the nose, his eyes and buttons are lollipops, and his mouth is a pickle.

The temperatures around here only got above freezing a very few times during the month of January, so the one day it was around 34 degrees it felt so nice and warm to us that we spent some of the afternoon with Tori riding her tricycle outside around the neighborhood.