My little girl

Natalie

For Natalie's birthday, I decided to do a blog post about her.  Natalie is not only my little girl but one of my best friends.  I love hanging out with her...talking, laughing and helping her chase her little ones around.  If you ever hear me talking on the phone to someone, laughing hysterically, there's a good chance I'm talking to her. I love her sense of humor and I love how we just "get" one another.

Natalie was a sweet, little 5 pound 15 oz baby at full term.  She was born with a lot of brown hair that got blonder and blonder with time. Her hair grew really fast...it was all the way down to her waist by the time she was three years old. 

As a little girl she loved anything that had to do with being outdoors or animals.  She loved hiking, skiing, snowboarding, boogie boarding, water skiing and hanging out at the lake or beach.  She was obsessed with horses and wanted to own horses when she grew up.  She was such a girly girl in appearance, but she played hard and never let getting dirt or grass stains stop her from having fun!

Natalie always had a lot of friends and liked her birthday parties to be done on a large scale.  She'd say, "Mom, can I invite my whole class to the park for my birthday...we can have a slip-n-slide, a water balloon fight and a BBQ!"...and we did!

When she was 14 she decided she wanted money for her birthday so she could go shopping and pick out her own gifts.  I thought it was way too boring to just give her money, so I taped $100 bill to the inside of a large box, filled it up with styrofoam peanuts and wrapped it.  She dumped out the peanuts in the middle of the living room and 10, or so, 14 year old girls proceeded to scatter and sift through the peanuts looking for her gift. OMG, worst idea ever...I was still cleaning up styrofoam peanuts by her 15th birthday!

When Natalie was little she had many interests and talents. She played the violin and she loved to dance.  She was in Super Steppers Jr. drill team as a little girl and she was also on the drill team in high school. She was also a great soccer player. I thought she was a good student in high school until she confessed (as adults love to do to their parents) to skipping school and going to the lake A LOT her senior year.  Luckily, she still pulled off good grades.  :)


Natalie has always loved being massaged and tickled. I had a bedtime routine (for years) of tickling the kids backs, faces and arms before they went to sleep. We had so many precious talks during that nightly one-on-one time and it really kept us close. 


She and I loved singing "Love Can Build a Bridge" together when she was little. We even sang it over the phone a few times, when we were sad and missing each other, when she got married and moved to Omaha.


Natalie and Tyler had such a close relationship growing up. She was always a good big sister. Although, according to Tyler, she beat him up a lot and by the time he got big enough to beat her up she had Spencer around to protect her. 

She met her sweet hubby, Spencer, when she was 16 and they got married when she was 19.  They moved to Omaha for him to go to pharmacy school, to SLC for his first pharmacy job and then to St. George to "come home". We are so happy to have them back in St. George! Natalie and Spencer are the proud parents of 2 1/2 year old Cameron and 1 year old Alivia.  Enjoy those babies...they grow up!

Happy Birthday!


Love,

Mom