Pumpkin Patch

We headed to the pumpkin patch today with my friend Stephanie and her little boy Wyatt. It was a gorgeous fall day with temps in the high 70s and glorious sunshine.

5 year anniversary

It's hard to believe that it's been 5 years since we said 'I do.' We had a great day and night. We hit the gym first thing in the morning, had an amazing breakfast at Snooze, walked around Cherry Creek and ended it all with a personalized dinner at Wine Experience. The best present I received is plane tickets for all of us to visit my best friend Geri and her family in Minneapolis in December. I also got a fabulous fabulous pair of Jimmy Choos...true love!

Neighborhood party

We hosted a neighborhood get together at our house on October 24. We have 13 houses on our street and had a great turnout of over 30 people. It was great to get to know all of our neighbors better and get everyone together.

8 months old

Time seriously needs to slow down! Isla turned 8 months old last week, and I didn't even get a decent picture. We made a Target run that day (a weekly...and sometimes daily occurance), and it was the first time that she'd sat in the shopping cart, so here's her 8 month photo. She is developing such a fun little personality and has us smiling all day every day. She's not showing us any signs of wanting to crawl, though we encourage her. The past month we took away the plastic bathtub, and she's now in the big tub on her own with lots of fun toys. She loves her nightly baths!

Dancing Queen

We have daily music time where we put Pandora on and blast the Beyonce channel. Isla LOVES the music and shaking her head and wiggling her body. She especially loves the Black Eyed Peas and Beyonce. It is too funny, and she's become quite good at performing on command for company!

It's slipper-wearin' weather

The temperature dropped a bit this weekend, and we had to turn our heat for the first time this season. Though the days are still in the high 60s and low 70s, the nights get quite cool. We had to break out Isla's little lamb slippers this morning. This week we also bought her a snowsuit and got her a sock monkey stocking cap. Winter, we're ready for ya!

After pics

And, here are the results of our landscaped backyard. We love the extra large stamped concrete patio, and plush patio furniture and some sort of shade contraption are on our the shopping list for next spring. We planted a garden in one of the flower beds, and we got some good tomatoes and herbs from it and learned alot about what not to do next season. We'll be getting some flowering shrubs down in the other planting beds shortly. The lower level flower bed was overflowing with petunias over the summer, and we just removed those. We'll have it all in good shape for Isla to run around in next summer!

Before pics

This is terribly overdue, but last night as we were getting ready to winterize our backyard, I remembered that I had never posted the before pics of our backyard landscaping and had never taken pics of the results. As you can tell from these pics, we had a terrible slope to deal with, thus a retaining wall had to be put in. What a mess it was, and we are so happy with the end result!

First trip to the zoo

It was a beautiful fall weekend in Denver this past weekend. My mom, dad and Spencer came up for the weekend, so we all headed to the zoo on Saturday. We don't think Isla really noticed any of the animals, but she enjoyed being out and about and watching all the people. She loves having family stay with us and getting all the attention. Sunday morning Mom and I went for a long walk with the kids and hit 3 parks along the way. Isla is stable enough to sit in baby swings now and loves them!

Play dates with the Murray boys

My dear friend Gretchen from college was in Colorado Springs this past week visiting her parents. She has 2 little boys - Haydn is 2 1/2 and Zane is 3 months. Isla and I went down to the Springs twice last week to spend lots of quality time with them all. Isla was very entertained by Haydn and loved giving little Baby Zane lots of kisses...or we called her licking Zane's face 'kisses.'