The beauty of Colorado...and a birthday!

Three weeks have passed since our arrival to Colorado - but BOY does it feel like longer than that.  All the hard labor of unpacking and settling in has made time feel sluggish.  Slowly our home has evolved within the walls of this house.  We are now fully unpacked (well...you know, there's always a box or two you never unpack!) and have begun enjoying the beauty that Colorado has to offer.  The state motto is "Colorful Colorado" and that's a perfect description.

Welcome to our Colorado home!

On our street alone we can see the mountains from one end and the wide-open prairie from the other end.  The rooms on the back of our home have a view of Pike's Peak - which can also be seen by anyone jumping on the trampoline at the apex of their jump!  On one of our first family walk outings, we discovered numerous scrawling trails criss-crossing the land behind our home.  And around one bend we saw a doe and her fawn.  

The doe and her (not-so-visible) fawn

We also hit the trail on our bikes last weekend and rode next to a stream that led to a nature preserve.  The stream was swift and the sights were all beautifully framed beneath the Rocky Mountains.  The climate is very tolerable here and the lack of humidity helps 93° not feel like 93°.  The trail was made of packed dirt with pea gravel atop it and all was well until a certain little girl's bike tire inner tube decided the gravel was too much for it.  So we walked back to the trailhead and headed home.

Our new neighborhood and it's criss-crossing gravel trails have afforded us the opportunity to take our go-kart out for some epic spins.  And I mean spins! Our son is ecstatic for this - since living on post before meant no go-karts on the streets.

And in the midst of all this fun, we celebrated a birthday! Our sweet little girl turned 7.  How did we go from this...

...to this in so little time?!  I'll never understand it!

She is a cat lover trapped in a dog household, so for her birthday she wished for cat "things".  And when your family already has 2 dogs and your daddy is allergic to cats, you get cat "things". Not a kitten.

Hubby has his "boots on the ground" at his unit and is surveying the companies along with what his job will entail with this unit's specialties and tempo.  It's a good thing he's already well acclimated to this altitude - he's put in 9 miles of running with soldiers already!  At 6,400 feet above sea level, running is no joke!

I'm still on sabbatical in my Facebook blackout (#nohashtags) and very content!  The only things that have pushed me remotely close to reactivating my account are desiring information about some of the things we want to plug into here in Colorado.  But so far I've found other ways to get that info.  Once I got passed the first couple of weeks, an internal calm settled in and hasn't left.  There's a peacefulness that can't be described unless one experiences the hush of no hashtags.

For now I'll leave you with a few more pictures of the beauty of this state...

The mountains at one end of our street

The prairie at the other end