A few trips to the beach!

Between Jerod's work trips (which Parker and I tagged along on) and our planned vacation, we have been away from home 3 of the past 4 weeks! I feel very spoiled, but am so glad to finally be home (although we are going on a mini staycation -it is only about 45 minutes from our house- this weekend to Guntersville lake for our anniversary)! We have decided to take Parker along with us on Friday night, but we plan on meeting Jerod's parents on Saturday. They will keep him Saturday night and my parents will keep him Sunday night. This is my FIRST night away from him so please pray that I do not make Jerod get up at 2am to go get him! Ha! I already feel homesick thinking about being away from the little booger! I think this will be more traumatic for me than Parker... in fact, I am pretty sure he will have a blast and wish we had done this much sooner!



Any ways, I will try to recap a week or so at a time over the next few days (if I recapped all four weeks at once, this post would about the length of a novel).

The first week, Jerod had a quick work trip to Florida planned. He had to be back Thursday morning because we had a doctors appointment to find out the gender of the baby (and I was NOT about to miss that) so Parker and I decided to stay behind on this one. Instead we went and spent part of the week in Tullahoma. We had a great week! One evening, Mark and Jody picked up dinner and met Mom, Dad, Parker and me at Imagination Station (a huge playground) for a picnic! When we pulled up at the park, Bob and Konnie pulled up with their grandson, Lincoln! Parker had a great time playing with little Lincoln... they were too cute together! Of course we forgot the camera :P.


Parker and I got up early Thursday morning to drive back to Huntsville to meet Jerod for our doctors appointment (in case you missed it, its a BOY!). We were only home for a day before we turned around and went back to Tullahoma for Easter weekend. We celebrated with Jerod's family on Saturday and then my parents on Sunday. We all (both families, including Ashley, Heath, Ben and Emily) went to Grace for church and then later that afternoon Mark and Jody joined us at mom and dads for Parkers first Easter egg hunt! Right after the hunt, we packed up the car and headed for Atlanta for the night. Ben and Emily so graciously hosted us (extremely last minute) so we didn't have such a long drive to Florida the next day! By the way, there is a whole post on Easter that we uploaded a few days ago... you can see pics there!


Monday morning we headed out to West Palm Beach for four days! Parker did surprisingly well in the car and we even got there in plenty of time to enjoy the afternoon/evening at the beach!

Jerod and I were both pleasantly surprised at how well Parker did considering he is only 16 months old and was in a car for 9 hours! While in West Palm, Jerod worked during the day, so Parker and I spent all of our afternoons on the beach or at the pool. Jerod always joined us after work for a little more swimming before going to dinner. Parker fell in LOVE with the water and the sand!

Later that week, we drove to Cocoa Beach to watch the shuttle launch (or at least that was the plan). Both Jerod's parents and my parents drove down to watch it, but unfortunately the launch was pushed back several times and we all missed it! :P We did get to stay a few extra days waiting for them to announce when they were actually going to launch, so it was not a total loss for us! While we were there, we took Parker to play putt putt for the first time! (By the way, these pictures were supposed to kind of show Parker in action, but they got all out of order when I loaded them! Now they just look like a bunch of the same picture but I am too lazy to fix it, ha!)

On the last day of our vacation, Jerod surprised us with a one night trip to Daytona Beach! I had mentioned a few weeks earlier that I had never been there and wanted to drive on the beach. It was a blast! Our hotel was awesome... right next to the beach, the pool, restaurants, the carnival at the pier, and all kinds of stuff! I think it was our favorite place that we went! We got there early and had late check out the next day, so it felt like we had a good bit of time to explore!

Parker is a pretty indipendent little thing so he thought he should be able to swim by himself! This is him trying to run away from Jerod!

Parker even got to experience his first ice cream cone on this trip!

While we were gone, several tornadoes hit in Alabama. The storms were pretty devastating to our surrounding area (luckily it missed our house and neighborhood), but we were out of power for about a week. We decided it was not worth going home to no power (and Redstone Arsenal where Jerod works was closed due to the power outage for the entire next week), so we extended our trip until we had word that our power was back on. We finally made it home the following Monday night! Our friends were nice enough to come and clean out our fridge and freezer (and even saved most of our food since they were able to borrow the generator), so not too much had changed when we got back home. It was pretty crazy seeing the damage from the storms though... the most shocking obviously were the lonely foundations and missing homes, but also the HUGE light poles along the interstate were bent and tangled as if they were rubber. Very real and VERY sad.

We stayed home that Tuesday-Saturday morning, before packing up to head to Aruba!

To be continued.... :)