Where has the time gone?!!

Andy and Steph have gone out for some Daddy / daughter bonding at the climbing wall so I'm taking this opportunity to try and catch up!
It's been two weeks since I last updated this and I honestly don't know where the time has gone, considering I'm not at work, the time has completely flown by.
As you can imagine from my lack of time we've had two rather busy weeks. Our second full week here wasn't really a normal week as the Thursday was July 4th, so Andy had both the Thursday and Friday off work.
The early part of the week Steph and I spent trying to gather some kind of routine around food shopping and general household chores. We also visited the swimming pool with a friend and her 2 year old son, Caleb. This was a very strange experience as it was an outdoor pool and it felt just like being on holiday, but it wasn't, this is the norm, very strange :). We also made it back to the library for story time on Tuesday where we met some more locals.
On the Wednesday I decided it was time to do some proper exploring so Steph and I headed into the centre of Boulder for the day. The centre of Boulder is very unusual for American towns as it is a proper pedestrianised street that runs for several blocks: Pearl Street. Dotted all along it are bronze statues of animals, water features for playing in, rocks for scrambling on and street entertainers, not to mention the wide variety of shops.

Steph and I spent a very hot day exploring all that Pearl Street had to offer. We found a great book shop, where we spent a good proportion of time browsing books (they had air conditioning in there) and, in Stephs case, swinging on the handrails. (a trick Daddy had taught her the previous weekend). We also found several outdoor shops, along with some very nice clothes shops and lots of arty shops, filled with work done by local artists - I need to start saving so I can buy some of their stuff, it was beautiful.

As well as day to day things Andy and I had also spent what felt like hours trying to get to grips with renting property over here and nurseries for Steph.
Regarding renting, there seems to be a steady stream of properties coming onto the market but in a wide range of sizes and some of them were coming on and then going on the same day. In doing our property search we found Craigslist! This is what seems to be the place to go if you have something to sell in the USA, or for a variety of other things aswell. Basically most towns / cities across the country have their own Craigslist page and you can find anything - ebay hasn't featured much since this discovery! Anyway we found Craigslist quite helpful as most people advertised their properties here. So during the early part of our second week we started to email a couple of properties as we felt we needed to start thinking about finding a house and the more we looked at the more we would know what we wanted. On the same Wednesday that we went to Pearl Street we started the day with our first house visit.
It was a very nice house, split level, which I loved, having come from a bungalow, but unfortunately it wasn't quite big enough for all our rubbish that is somewhere on the high seas.
The other thing we did that Wednesday morning was visit a nursery. Day care over here seems to be slightly different from the UK and what we are used to. There is lots of talk about Pre-school but this doesn't start until the children are 2.5 and apparently there are long waiting lists. There are a few places that take children that are younger but it seems you need to hunt them down. We have been quite keen to find Steph a nursery. Partly because she is used to going 3 days a week and we feel the nursery in the UK did so much for her (thank you very much Mongewell Park, you were fab and we were very sorry to leave you) that we'd like to try and continue that if we can. Also, we still have another house move to do and lots of jobs to do linked to this move and, so far, Steph has been very good and patient but we don't really want to cart her round car garages and house viewings too much if we can help it. Consequently, we wanted to find somewhere good, with space for Steph before she forgets what nursery is. So after some investigations we discovered that Bright Horizons, who ran her UK nursery, also run nurseries over here and, in particular, have one in Louisville, where we were centring our house search. We were very impressed with the nursery, they all seemed very friendly there, the children looked happy and they had a very good set up in a purpose built building. Lots of thinking and chatting to do :)
We had a very good first 4th July. There was a pot luck picnic being held at the local park so we headed down there and met up with Olivia and family and friends and enjoyed a very jolly picnic.

We followed this with another walk. This time to Red Rocks Trails. This was another very scenic spot with some rocks for scrambling up. A little bit like Brimham Rocks for those that have been there but much smaller and higher up. We had a little monkey that was collecting rocks rapidly and trying to fill her pockets so she could keep them all!

Friday had us visiting another town to check it out. We went to Longmont, which was deemed too far away - all of 14 miles I think! But we did find a butcher there who does sell some English cuts of meet, we came home with a very tasty bit of beef for roasting. Sadly they didn't do back bacon though - still on the hunt for that, need my bacon butties.
We also went to Gunbarrel where we investigated another house, this time too big! I'm starting to feel a bit like Goldilocks. Much as we were tempted by the house, Gunbarrel was very similar to Superior, lots of housing estates and not a lot else so we decided to leave it and hope for something in Louisville.
Saturday and Sunday were spent doing a couple of walks, again taking in the beauty of the local area and just enjoying the sheer closeness of everything. We paid another visit to Craigslist this week to make the walking easier and managed to get a good second hand back carrier. Money well spent :)

We also squeezed in some test drives on cars to try and work out what we wanted to buy. We have spent a lot of time driving round car parks, looking at the various cars and working out if that is what we want!!!
Generally we had a very relaxing weekend doing a little bit of everything and just enjoying time together as a family. Which was a good job as our third week here proved to be a particularly busy week.........