Estes Park Girl Day

Today Maya and I went to Estes Park to meet up with my mom, Holly, and Aunt Wendy. It was so fun! Maya was in great spirits all day, which really helped to make the day more enjoyable. 

First we met at Grumpy Gringo's, a Mexican restaurant outside of the main downtown area. My family has gone there every time we go to Estes for years. 

After lunch, we hit the shops downtown. We walked around for a while, bought a few goodies, and had ice cream. 

I wore my lillebaby COMPLETE carrier for the duration of the walk. I even managed to continue walking around while nursing her in it! I felt super sneaky. 

In one of the shops Holly gave Maya a little mouse finger puppet to hold. She proceeded to mark it well with her saliva. She liked it so much my mom got it for her as a little treat. She loves holding the tail and whipping that thing around!

After the shops we drove to The Stanley Hotel. We didn't stay long but we enjoyed sitting on the deck and hanging out on the grounds. 

Estes Park is such a lovely little town. It is always really nice to visit and enjoy the mountain air and unique shops. It was also wonderful to spend time with family and see my Aunt Wendy while she is visiting!

Until next time...

A Vase of Flowers

Today Maya noticed a vase of flowers on the sidebar in our dining room. With such beautiful colors to behold, it was immediately a necessary commodity for her personal enjoyment. As you can see, she was pretty ecstatic about it, as her new-found squishy face means something wonderful is happening. 

Then her excitement toned down a bit and she did a cute pose.

By George, the flowers can come out! What a thrill!

And furthermore, the stems come off of the heads! Could it get any better??

Seriously awesome discovery for her, and a somewhat sad realization for me because I probably just doomed the life of that vase in the months to come. 

And then I found this gem on Ryan's phone:

Remember to enjoy the little things in life!

Go Rockies!!

I love going to Rockies games! This past Saturday our friends invited us to go with them to a game. They had great seats - right behind home plate. We arrived a little late and decided to get food first. Baseball games are all about the food. Yummy delicious yet disgusting Monster Nachos is my go-to meal every time!

Maya was very enthralled by everything going on around her. It was already close to her bedtime, but she was not even a tiny bit tired. And then we got to our seats. And the crowd cheered (a lot.... the Rockies were doing great!). And poor Maya got so scared! Her bottom lip was curled down in a huge frown. It was cute; like she was trying really hard not to cry. For the first hour or so she just snuggled up to me and had her head on my shoulder. When the crowd cheered she would grasp on tightly, but only twice did her little body shake with cries. She was very brave. 

Me and Jenna and remnants of Monster Nachos.  

Her nervous face. 

After she had her bottle her spirits perked up a bit. Ryan took her and played with her. After that she had a great time! Even though she was up 2 hours past her bedtime she never got fussy. 

Daddy makes everything better!

Any excuse to get a cute new outfit...!

Watching the game. 

Silver toes. 

We hope to get to go again this summer! 

Backyardigans

Our backyard! It is done!! It only took a year from start to finish, but it is completed! 

We were going to originally build a deck. Well, Ryan was going to. But eventually we decided concrete made more sense because of the large area we wanted to cover. 

Here is the finished product:

We are loving it. We have already had 4 BBQs with friends/family and we've only had it for 2 weeks. It's so nice not to have any more dirt anywhere. I conducted a short interview with Ryan. 

Q: how do you feel about it getting done?

A: Great. 

Q: What was your least favorite part?

A: digging the trenches for the sprinkler system. 

Q: what was your favorite part?

A: laying the sod. 

Q: if you could redo something what would it be?

A: to not dig those trenches so freaking deep. 

Well, my dear husband, you did a swell job with your first landscaping endeavor. May it be your last!

Maya and I very much enjoyed a BBQ! And yes, she is gnawing on a big chunk of beef. 

Maya - 7 Months

My baby is 7 months old! This past month went by ridiculously fast. I think she will remain 6-months permanently in my mind.

"I'm 7-months old! Y'all better recognize!"

She is still a tiny little baby, fitting into some 3-month clothes. You can tell that her "7" onesie is rather large on her. It's a size 6-12 month.

She has learned to shake her head "no". I'm sure she has pretty much no clue what she is communicating when she does it, but she does at it the right times fairly often, like when I'm trying to feed her. But other times she'll just be playing with her toys and shake her head a lot. This is her shaking her head.

She is now wanting everything. As you can tell by the pictures I tried to take, she was not in the mood to just LOOK at the camera. It had to be touched!!

She still loves being outside. And I love taking her there! I have started going for a run 3 times a week. She sits quietly in the jogger and always falls asleep.

She has started eating "real" food. She hasn't rejected anything she has tried yet, and I'm hoping that doesn't change anytime soon.

She can roll over both directions now. Almost 100% of the time she rolls on to her tummy to sleep now. And she's getting good at trying to get up on her knees.

She is SO wiggly!! She is constantly moving her arms or legs. I think she's starting her exercise regime early.

Moving those arms!

You know how people say that a picture taken from above is more flattering? Just in case you don't believe that, here is proof:

Looking forward to new adventures with my 7-month old!

4th of July

Hooray for the 4th of July! I love this holiday. It's so fun to get to celebrate something outside in the nice weather. And since Erie does their celebration on the 3rd, we got two days of fun! A few weeks prior I asked Ryan what we were going to do this year since we have Maya now. He said, quite matter of fact, "We are going to go watch fireworks." So that is what we did.

We invited Dave and Ashley and their family to come watch them with us, and we were excited that they were able to make it! We got to the golf course where they were shooting off the fireworks around 7:45 PM and then hung out and talked for the next couple of hours. Maya fell asleep in her carrier around 9 PM so she missed the fireworks, but that was okay.

The show was great. We enjoyed everything about that evening. Except for driving home. We were at a stand-still trying to get out of the neighborhood for half an hour!

Maya is learning how to fly.

The festivities

The boys played a little catch with the football

Letters

Holly and I had a fun craft day last week! We weren't quite sure what we wanted to do at first, and decided it had to be something to die for. And then Holly found these cute letters on Etsy and we had to make some! She chose to do "G & H" for her and Garrett's room, and I decided to do just a "K".

We went to Hobby Lobby and purchased our supplies. It's always fun to pick stuff out for a craft, especially when Ryan is there trying to persuade us to get mustache stickers to put on our letters.

Then we met up at my house and got to making our letters! I felt kind of bad because I was in-and-out a lot due to being a mother as well as having a conference call for work that afternoon. But since she had 3 letters and I only had 1, we still finished at the same time.

Aren't they so cute?

Maya participated by placing her little cereal puff on our drying board.

I look forward to our next craft-date!

Visitors: Birds and Humans

We were able to get some cool shots of the birds living on our porch. It was much more fun to have them in a spot where we could watch them! They are all grown up and gone now and we hope that they remember us fondly. We only wish that they had said good-bye.

Daddy Bird

Mommy and Daddy Bird

Baby Bird peeking out

Mommy and Daddy Bird were never too far

 

Baby Bird all grown up

We also had some human visitors! Papa and Sessie came for just a day because they picked up my cousin Jade and her friend Sarah in Wyoming. They stopped by for a few hours. It was so fun to see them all!