Crazy Old Elise, Always Good for a Laugh

 She does funny things, but also constantly tries to make us laugh. She does this scrunch-face thing and breathes heavily through her nose. It is awesome. She also climbs on top of the printer a lot. It would annoy me, but she gets stuck every time and then we laugh and take pictures until we help her down. 

 Elise is dying to wear shoes, if she could only figure out how to walk in them. I don't bother putting shoes on her since it's hot and she falls over in them, but she frequently attempts to wear Sadie's shoes.

Louie also watches people and imitates them when she thinks they are doing something funny. Tonight at dinner Sadie was legitimately shaking her head no about something and Elise thought it was the best joke. She shook her head back and forth for 5 minutes and giggled.  

Alright, so Sadie is funny too. She found these onesie pjs in the back of her drawer and was dead set on wearing them while unloading every item in our bathroom drawers. She lasted about 10 minutes before she realized that body-length zippers are not comfortable. 

I am pleased to report that Elise is stepping up as comedienne of the Nielson household. Her actions aren't always deliberately funny, but she makes us laugh constantly.

So Play With Me, Maybe?

Our girls seem to be actually developing a relationship. I read other people's blogs where they talk about their older child doting on the baby, their kids laughing hysterically together and/or the younger one just worshiping the older one. That hasn't been the case with ours. When Elise was a baby Sadie didn't acknowledge her much, except for to notice when she was getting attention from one of us that Sadie wanted. When Sadie does recognize Lou's existence, it usually brings crying/fighting/hitting/whining. I mention all that to say that things are a-changing. A month ago nearly all of their interactions were negative, and now the number of negative exchanges per day is probably the same, but the number of positive interactions has shot through the roof. 

Here's to hoping these two will be friends, or at least frienemies. 

PS- the post title is an ode to Sadie's favorite song. It makes me laugh every single time she sings it.

Bunch a Crazies

Do you all realize the kind of craziness I live with?

Exhibit A

 Elise has discovered the joys of playing with your food

 Exhibit B

*Any tips on how to get your kid to stop coming in your room in the middle of the night would be appreciated

Exhibit C

Sadie took both of those photos, but Daniel chose to pose like that

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.

Princess Party & A Good-bye

A couple weeks ago I took Sadie and her friend Ella to the Princess Festival at Thanksgiving Point. The Dunns were about to move so we squeezed in as much time together as we could before they left. The idea of the festival is very cute- a big party where everyone comes dressed up and they get to see lots of princesses, but it actually wasn't that well done. Any girls over age 5 would probably recognize how lame parts of it were, but that doesn't matter because Sadie LOVED it. Yes, she loved it enough that it warrants CAPS. We just won't bring Sadie again since next year she won't be free anymore.

 

It started off a bit slow. They tried to make us attend these little performances with made-up, non-Disney princesses. The girls could care less about story time with someone they have never heard of. They didn't even want to sit through Cinderella story time (below). We left after 2 minutes.

Sadie was in the zone. She ran around taking pictures with everything possible.

Rapunzel the live princess and Rapunzel the cardboard cut out.

Ella was mostly happy to just stay with me and watch Sadie take pictures. She finally agreed to take a picture with Belle here, but then immediately ran back to my arms. She wasn't as enthusiastic about the princess festival as Sadie. I think she just wanted some good snuggle time with me since she knew her family was moving soon. :)

During lunch the girls were being so incredibly adorable. I got a little teary-eyed as I watched them laugh together.

Seriously, this is what lunch with a couple of three year olds (Sadie's almost 3) should be. If only life with Sadie was always like that.

After lunch Sadie got her nails and hair done. I was so impressed with how still Sadie sat as they curled her hair. She has asked me to curl her hair a few times since then but I don't have any tiny curling irons so I can say no without feeling too guilty.

Then we attended a dance party with lots of princesses.

Ella sat on my lap and watched the dance party.

Sadie was feelin it. She danced like I have never seen her dance before.

Our last event of the day was a little dance performance. Sadie jumped up when they asked for volunteers. It's funny, mostly because Sadie is normally fairly reserved in new situations, but I think because everyone was dressed up and they called her by her first name (all the little girls had big name tags on), she felt totally comfortable.

Ella sat on my lap and sprinkled pixie dust in her hair the whole time. Earlier in the day we had seen a little girl with a bag of glitter, AKA pixie dust, and Ella really wanted some. We found some at a little booth right before this last activity and Ella was happy to sit and sprinkle it. Funny girl.

 The next day we had one final get-together with the Dunns and some of our other friends before they moved to Jacksonville. It's hard to have good friends move away. Tyler and Daniel were roommates almost 10 years ago in Liberty Square and we have all pretty much lived in Utah since then. 

We will miss you, Tyler, Amber, Ella and Cooper!

Life Changes

On top of Sadie being potty trained for everyone but her mother, we have had lots of changes in June.

1. Lou is in a forward facing car seat. She understood exactly what to do when her pediatrician said she needed to gain a couple more pounds before she could make the switch. She gained 2 pounds in 3 weeks by eating all food in sight and now is back to leaving most of her food on the highchair tray. This is her maiden voyage while forward facing and she was visibly excited the entire time.

2. The girls played well together a few times. Don't worry, Sadie still terrorizes Elise the rest of the time, but just let it be known they actually had a good time while interacting on a few occasions. Elise got some revenge the other day when Sadie was laying on top of her. She jerked her head back quickly and popped Sadie in the nose real good. Sadie had a nice bloody nose for a while. I really hope it means she'll stop laying on top of Elise. It's really annoying.

3. Definitely not major, but Sadie can stack all of the pieces to her block puzzle and she's mighty proud.

 4. Elise plays on the playground a little. Sadie showed her how to turn the steering wheel she thought that was pretty cool.

 

 5. Sadie seems to finally understand what a fire truck is. She used to ask me about them every time we passed one. And then reply with "why" to everything I said. Wal-mart was having a safety day so she got to check out the inside of this fire engine and an ambulance.  She tells me that ambulances have lots of medicines and band-aids and fire trucks have water to help smoke and fire.

6. Last, and most importantly, Elise is walking! She still crawls if she wants to get somewhere quickly, but she does walk more than half the time.