The Raulerson Family: February 2013

The beach is my sanctuary. The place were I can go and instantly feel relaxed. Derek and I are always saying that we need to enjoy our beach so much more than we do. I mean, people pay big money to come here and enjoy what we can enjoy for free! It's our goal this year to get to the beach as often as possible. A couple Sundays ago, we went out to watch the sunset and let Harper play in the sand. I hadn't bought new beach toys yet, so she was stuck with her Halloween pumpkin bucket and a cup! A little white-trashy, but she could have cared less.

it was a make it work moment

the water is still too cold to get in

my two favorite people
i love the clouds in the background

i can never see too many of these

Old Man Winter decided to be nice to us and deliver 80 degree weather this week. Harper and I decided to take advantage of it and spent this morning at the beach. It was such a beautiful day. Neither one of us wanted to leave, but naptime was calling.

we're spoiled

We took our first real road trip with Harper the first weekend of February. Our sweet friend (more like a sister), Katie, was getting married outside of Knoxville, TN on Saturday so we decided to expand the trip a couple of days and spend some time in Asheville. It was fun to take Harper back to where our lives as husband and wife began and spend some time with great friends. We hadn't gone further than a couple of hours in the car with Harper and I had some serious anxiety about a 12 hour trip with a one and a half year old. Thankfully, she did amazing! I do have to give props to Apple for the invention of the iPad. Without that device, every moment of those 12 hours would have seemed soooo much longer!

We stayed with our friends Zack, Robin and their little girl, Ruby our first night. Sadly, on our second day Ruby woke up from her nap with flu like symptoms. The poor, poor thing. :( I'm not normally a germaphobe, but after all the hype about the flu on the news, we decided it would be better for us to move to a hotel for the rest of our trip. Thankfully, it turned out that Ruby just had a cold.

We woke up to snow on Friday and were excited for Harper to see snow for the first time. We drove out to Windy Gap, the Young Life camp where I used to work, to see friends and play in the snow. She loved it. Unfortunately, we didn't have proper snow-enjoying attire, so we had to make it faster than she would have liked.

Katie and Spencer's wedding was so beautiful and sweet. Harper was super excited about the hymnals in the back of the pew and continued to say "BOOK!" as loud as she could. We were so thankful that we were able to see Katie and Spencer get married and we are so excited about their new life together in New Orleans.

I didn't take as many pictures on our trip as I would have liked. Here's a sampling for you to enjoy.