July 4th Weekend Fun

We started off our July 4th Weekend with lots of time outside with Daddy of course! Saturday morning, Daniel had fun helping Daddy out in the yard, pulling weeds and mowing. One of the biggest things to emerge this week for Daniel is pretending. We've seen bits of pretend playing here and there, but now, this is a kid with a plan and an imagination to go with it! Daniel got his lawnmower out to mow alongside Daddy, and when that got a little old, he headed back to the garage, where he got his "tip-tip" and put gas in his lawnmower, just like Daddy. He also grabbed a piece of cardboard and was trying to put it on his lawnmower- I think that he was trying to make it like the bag on Daddy's lawnmower. Wait till he discovers the magic of tape! And then, he would take his lawnmower over to the lawn bag, and dump it, just like Daddy dumps his bag. It was so cute to watch all of this pretending!

Other pretending stories include pretending to eat at a lapdesk he found in the basement- he would tell me he was eating fries (picking them up with a pincer grasp), he'd say that they were hot, he'd blow on the imaginary fry, and then eat it with an "ummm" (his this is yummy eating sound). I'm loving it!

Anyway, Saturday night we went to see a Firework show in Oak Brook, which was tons of fun. More on that later.

Sunday morning (today), Daniel waved his very own flag around the house in pj's after sleeping in until 8:30! (We were glad he slept so well after being up SO LATE last night!) Later in the morning, Daddy and Daniel hit the parks for some more fun outside. After Daniel's 2 1/2 hour nap, we headed to Grandma Mary Kay's house for more outdoor fun watering plants and playing with a box full of balls. Daniel was also enjoying their playhouse in the basement. After a yummy dinner and more playtime, we headed home and even spied a full arc of a rainbow during the short rainshower we drove through. Awesome! We played some more at home, watched a few "booms" our neighbors made, pretended to eat cookies on the blanket in our family room, and then Daniel went to bed at a more decent hour and you can bet he clonked right out because he sure had a busy weekend! He slept through all of the firework excitement around our house and we have very noisy neighbors! Ben and I could see our town's fireworks from one of our upstairs windows, which was good enough for me since we'd already been to a fireworks show the night before. It was nice to relax at home after a busy weekend.

Happy 4th of July everybody!