Fourth of July

We had a fun Independence Day in the Nielson household. The girls and I played in the basement while Daniel cleaned the rest of the house. Super fun for me. Sadie has taken to making Elise play dress-up, which just means I have to put whatever outfit Sadie demands on Elise.

Louie played on the slide for a long time while dressed as a "fairy" according to Sadie.

Then Sadie decided Elise needed to be the prince, she'd be the princess and I could be the red dragon.

We played that for a while until we decided we should go mess up all the cleaning Daniel had done.

We drove up to the Highland splash pad, which was surprisingly not busy. We observed the fire in American Fork canyon on our way there.

I actually took that picture on July 3rd, the day the fire started. It looked much less ominous on July 4th.

The girls love going to the splash pad but they don't like being splashed in the face, which is pretty hard to avoid.

Sadie told me it was too sunny to put her hands down for a picture.

When it was time to go Sadie ran away after I took off her swim suit. Again, with the streaking. Should we be at all nervous about how much she loves to be naked in public? She actually just ran towards our car so we followed her and put her clothes on in the car.

The whole family took naps when we got home and I put together Sadie's birthday present from Nana and Papa- a new bike. I decided to give it to her now so she could get a lot of riding time this summer and to spread out her presents. Some toys inevitably get neglected when you get them all at once on your birthday.

Sadie was so excited when she spotted it after her nap. Here she is checking it out for the first time.

We brought it outside where both girls had a good time playing with it.

Then we made sno-cones (I gave Daniel a sno-cone maker for Father's Day) and made Daniel get up from his nap.

Sadie spent some more time outside with no clothes on. What's more patriotic than that, right?

It took Sadie a few days to get the whole pedaling concept and we are still working on steering, but at least now she can move the bike on her own. That bike has become a hot commodity in our house. I was surprised at how much Elise loves it, but she can't keep her hands off it.

Sadie even watched a movie while sitting on it.

Back to July 4th, we played in our neighbor's kiddie pool after eating our sno-cones and then had an all-American dinner of Cafe Rio salads. Elise went to bed while we watched our annual neighborhood fireworks show. Sadie shocked us by actually holding a sparkler and loving it.