This was the first year in many, that our daughter Natalie, was the only one of our kids to participate in piano lessons. It was exciting to see her perform in the Christmas recital, but we sure missed seeing Christine and Tim play as well. Hopefully after this break, they will resume lessons next year. Natalie did a great job on her pieces. She had a solo piece which you can watch here and she also did a beautiful duet with her piano teacher that you can watch here.
We have been so blessed to be able to provide piano lessons for five of our kids so far. The weekly piano drives are a sacrifice, and paying the piano bill is too, but when we hear the kids playing beautiful music and we see the discipline they’ve developed through their hard work, and watch them cry and agonize over tough concepts and pieces….yet persevere and come to the end result of amazing beauty, it’s all worth it.
Over the holiday season the girls were hired to play for the local Rotary club. They worked super hard on special pieces for it and even bought some new music. Altogether they had a couple of hours of gorgeous music planned and prepared. Imagine the disappointment they felt when they arrived and found just a small keyboard to work with. For a pianist it’s comparable to painting the outside of a house with a tooth brush, and yet they managed to pull through and bring beauty to the evening anyway. It stretched them both and we were proud of them for taking the tool that was provided and figuring out how to work with it. It meant they could only play a few of the pieces they had prepared since the keyboard was much too small to play most of them, but they managed and did well.
During the Christmas dinner our church put on for the community, our girls had the chance to use all the music they had prepared as they played the piano during the dinner. It was perfect!
Below are a few pictures of Natalie’s Christmas Recital
Nurturing the Heart 