Lisa Beth

It’s that time of year at the Beavers’ house!! Eric is all about his christmas cookie baking!! He doesn’t mess around, and he goes all out baking up a storm.  First, you must set the mood…. Christmas tree lit? check.

Christmas music with the Rat Pack playing over the surround sound speakers? check.  Coffee brewing? check.  Bottle of Duplin Christmas wine? check… (haha j/k… that’s not a cookie baking staple, we just found it when we were shopping for all the ingredients and thought it’d be fun to try.)

And of course, what is a cookie baking party without some friends to join in on the fun?  Last year, our dear friend Kelly helped us with our cookie baking, and this year she joined us as well as her room mate/our friend Anna and our friend Mike (who took most of these pictures).

We were so bummed that Eric’s mom couldn’t join us, as she was planning on coming up for the whole weekend to bake cookies and watch Christmas movies with us, and come to Hope Cafe’s Christmas party, but was unable to do so because of some bad weather forecasts.  We missed you Tammie!!!

The “first shift” was all Eric… baking his classic hershey kiss cookies and the peanut butter cup cookies…

you can almost taste them just by looking at that melty chocolate, can’t you?!

Then we watched one of our favorite newer Christmas classic movies… “Elf” with Will Ferrel.  So many funny scenes and quotable lines… kept us laughing the whole movie even though we’ve seen it so many times.

After the movie, I took over the second shift of cookie baking and mixed up my go-to Betty Crocker sugar cookie mix-in-a-bag  (I do not claim to be a pro in the kitchen by any means)…. and then we all contributed our creative talents to decorating them with colored icing.

Eric even humored me and let Mike take a Christmas picture of us by our tree  Merry Christmas from the Beavers!!!

Ah, the much anticipated Christmas Tree search!

We had talked about whether to go to a tree farm and cut down our own, or go to the Farmer’s market and choose a pre-cut tree.  There were advantages and disadvantages to both.  The disadvantage of cutting down your own tree, is that in our area, they don’t grow the nice Frasier Firs that are so popular and perfect for the ideal “look” of a Christmas Tree.  These trees are only grown in the far western part of our state.  But of course, the disadvantage of buying a pre-cut tree is that you miss out on the “whole experience” of wandering through the fields of trees and searching for that perfect tree and then taking it down with your own hands with a saw!!

So, you are wondering… what did we do?  BOTH!  Yes, we decided first to go to a tree farm and see if maybe they had any good looking firs growing on site.  We knew this particular farm also had shipped in pre-cut trees if we ended up not finding any to cut down ourselves.

Eric’s internet search led us to this place called  ”Back Achers” Christmas Tree Farm

(and yes, that is a wild turkey on the top of the truck… not so wild though, as he and his friends were everywhere, mingling with the tree farm guests… very random and a bit bizarre, but added to the whole experience I guess)

Upon arrival, we meandered around the “cut your own” section, but quickly decided against the long needled trees in favor of the pre-cut short needled frasiers.   We watched as the older gentlemen who owned the farm bagged up others’ trees for $1….

we were thinking of spending around $30-$40 on an 8 foot tree… we thought… cute little family owned tree farm, more reasonable prices than buying it “in town”.  wow were we wrong!  There was not a tree there under $65!!  Craziness!  We promptly got right back in the truck to try Option B… destination:  the Raleigh Farmer’s Market!

At first when we arrived, we were “heckled” and “harassed” by an obnoxious tree salesman trying to get us to buy one of his $85 trees… yeah, no thanks.  We were getting discouraged again thinking are we seriously going to have to pay a fortune for a live tree?  when we came upon this wonderful man here with me in the picture below!

I know he doesn’t exactly look as thrilled as I am in this picture, but I assure you, he was extremely friendly and had the most endearing southern accent with words that whistled through his dentures as he spoke.  He was a part of a church group that brought trees in from Boone, NC.  He was an avid Appalachian State fan, and told me how his wife works at ASU and gets him free tickets to the sports games.  His trees were much more reasonably priced, and he wasn’t pushy at all.  Here is our “loot” with it’s much-more-reasonable price tag attached

He helped to trim off the branches at the bottom of the tree, and I quickly scooped them up, knowing there would be some decorating use for the extra pine boughs

He suggested that Eric get his picture with his saw… he was all about helping us get pictures to document the whole experience and said how they could go in our Christmas album

Proud owner of a REAL Christmas Tree!!

Now off to load it in the truck (Eric was so happy to have his truck for this occasion)

Stay tuned for pictures of the tree decorated and more festive holiday photos of our annual Christmas Cookie Baking/Christmas Movie Night!!!

I know I’ve been bit of a blogging maniac lately… For those of you who have been bored each time you check this blog and there are no changes, I guess I’m making up for lost time

I realized a few days ago that today, October 4th, marks the day that Eric and I said goodbye to our beloved friends and home in the Minneapolis area of Minnesota,

and moved together with all our earthly possessions to the sunny southern state of North Carolina  (aka: as Eric refers to it: “The Promised Land”).  I remember the day like it was yesterday… frought with so much emotion, both acute sadness and a stirring sense of anticipation of starting our next chapter together in a new state.

The first few hours of the trip I cried and cried to my plant, “Percy” sitting next to me in the passenger seat of my loaded up Honda,

driving behind Eric in our truck, (and later hitching the Honda behind the truck) missing so much all that I was driving away from.

But as the miles past,  I became more and more excited about what lay ahead.

Two days later, we found ourselves settling into the town of Holly Springs with the help of our new church family at GraceWay and Eric’s brother Joe!

Since last October, I think I have experienced more change in 1 single year of my life than I have in all my other 26 years combined.  Seriously.  I was having coffee with a new friend the other day, catching her up on our story since we moved from Minnesota, and I didn’t realize until I started telling our story chronologically, just how MUCH change we’ve experienced in 12 short months.  I’ve decided to be honest and put it all out there for you, my blog readers.  I don’t know how much you’ve heard or been updated on, as it is exhausting to update all the people you love when SO much change occurs.  Just when you’ve updated everyone, it seems like another change happens, and suddenly, everyone is out of the loop again.  So here is my attempt to summarize in bullet point fashion, some of what the Beavers’ past 12 months have looked like:

• Moved from our house in Richfield, MN—to someone else’s house in Holly Springs, NC– to renting an apartment in Garner, NC  (3 total places we’ve lived in 1 year)
• We have rented our house in MN to several tenants, all who have let us down and have had to be evicted because they did not pay rent.  We now have our house on the market for the month of October, and are praying it will sell soon!
• Eric has changed from working full time at The Hyatt Place in MN– to working part time at a christian bookstore and part time as worship pastor at Graceway Church—to working part time as a barista at Hope Cafe and part time as Pastor of creative arts at Hope Cafe Church (3 job changes total for Eric in 12 months)
• I went from working full time at a dental office in MN–to working part time at a dental office in Holly Springs, NC—to working full time at a different dental office in Garner, NC  (3 job changes for Lisa in less than 12 months…. are you keeping up so far?)
• Then, we as a couple went from being a part of an amazing church community in MN, “The Garden Communities”– to a new church plant in Angier, NC, GraceWay Fellowship — to a church re-plant in Raleigh, NC where we are now, Hope Cafe Church.   (transition from GraceWay to Hope Church being a long, long story and a very painful journey, but we are SO thankful for our new church and feel confident that Hope Cafe Church is where we belong.)

So many major life changes… so many lessons learned along the way.  We have struggled, and we have been hurt and disappointed.  We have experienced financial set-backs.  We have had our relationship tested by these things, and by God’s grace have come through these difficult times as an even closer united front in our marriage.   We can only humbly thank God for the gift of bringing us through one step at a time.  I can’t say I would have chosen any of the hard things, but I have seen this to be true of hard times:  it brings us to our knees and closer to God, and that is ALWAYS a good thing.  Even though this past year has been challenging in many ways, I would still declare from a mountain top at the top of my lungs that God is good… all the time, and that I love Him with all my heart.   He has truly been my refuge and strength… my ever-present help in trouble.

I would like to share a passage of scripture that has recently become dear to me.  Deuteronomy 8: 1-18 (ESV)… bold and italics, my own additions for emphasis…

Remember the LORD Your God

¹“The whole commandment that I command you today you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land that the LORD swore to give to your fathers. ²And you shall remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not.³And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. ⁴Your clothing did not wear out on you and your foot did not swell these forty years. ⁵Know then in your heart that, as a man disciplines his son, the LORD your God disciplines you. ⁶So you shall keep the commandments of the LORD your God by walking in his ways and by fearing him. ⁷For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing out in the valleys and hills, ⁸a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, ⁹a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper. ¹⁰And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the LORD your God for the good land he has given you.¹¹“Take care lest you forget the LORD your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, ¹² lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, ¹³and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, ¹⁴ then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, ¹⁵who led you through the great and terrifying wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water,who brought you water out of the flinty rock, ¹⁶who fed you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know, that he might humble you and test you, to do you good in the end. ¹⁷Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ ¹⁸You shall remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is this day.

To close this blog, here are some pictures of me and Eric having dinner with our friend Kelly (taking the pictures of us) exactly a year ago this weekend at Macaroni Grill in Cary, NC to celebrate our arrival the evening we arrived at our Holly Springs house after driving for SO many hours.

Here’s us “prosting” (German version of a toast) to our new lives in NC… how could we ever have known then all the changes that awaited us in the coming months.  So here’s to the next year in North Carolina and all the adventures that await the Beavers!!

Our last day of our vacation we spent at this gorgeous beach house that Erin had rented for the week (she also rented a harley, so we didn’t feel too bad that we hadn’t brought the bike for her to ride, haha).  Here are some inside shots of the place to help you get a feel for how luxurious it was.  I had never stayed in an ocean front beach house before, and it was SO much fun.

It was a cloudy rainy day on Monday morning, so some of the shots turned out a bit dark, but you get the picture…

The kitchen window faced the ocean’s waves… it was such a cozy morning… Eric and Erin’s dad, Marty are slowly waking up as the coffee kicks in…

I’m experimenting on up-close shots and adjusting the lens to focus on the closer object and blur out the background.  photography is so much fun.

Here is Erin making her famous crepes!!

And her mom, Joy being silly… I caught her with her curlers in, so she posed to complete the look–haha!

We enjoyed quite a spread for our breakfast of an array of fresh fruits as options to create our own made-to-order crepes. This is probably my favorite picture

Erin and I enjoyed a nice long stroll on the beach in the misty rain catching up.  This was the walkway from the house to the beach:

Eric and Marty had a rivalry pool game going on..

and there were many spirited ping-pong matches… I think Erin and Marty were dubbed the champions if I remember correctly… I did find the trick to beat Erin was to make her laugh so hard to the point of distraction

We had such a relaxing day enjoying quality time with Erin and her mom, dad, and sister Carly.  You can’t beat soaking in a hot tub with a back-drop of the ocean waves and a light ocean mist on your face carried by the wind of the surf… what a way to finish out our weekend of celebrating our 3 year anniversary!

Also, right outside our bedroom was a hammock!

I am so overwhelmed at the generosity of my friend Erin.  She has been such a blessing in our lives since we moved to NC.  Not just because she gave us her motorcycle and let us stay at her rented beach house … it’s more than that.  She is just one of those true friends who is somewhat of a kindred spirit.  I miss her so much since she was deployed to Afghanistan.  Our book club still sends her packages and writes her letters and sends her the books that we are reading so she can still participate.  It’s so cool getting those hand-written letters back from her in the mail knowing that she wrote them in such a far-away place.  Thank you, Erin–and all our other armed forces–who are sacrificing so much, being away from their families and friends and familiarity to serve overseas in our military.

So! That was our trip! Hope you enjoyed going on this blog journey with me and that these images bring a “vacation for the eyes” as they do for me each time I look back at them.   Eric and I are so happy to be able to travel and explore this beautiful world God created.  We feel so grateful that we have been given 3 wonderful years together, and I look forward to many many more  I look forward to growing old with this man and to one day sitting on our front porch, reminiscing back on all our adventures.  I love you, Eric!!

Well, for those of you who are my facebook friends, you’ve already seen the rest of the Outer Banks Photo Album, so these next 2 posts might be anti-climactic, but I couldn’t wait to post the album on fb.  It was one of those, “think-of-it: do-it” moments.  So I will write some dialogue to maybe help keep it interesting for those of you who have already seen these images… and for those of you who have not… and have been waiting in suspense (haha), here is Day Three:

We woke up the next morning and saw this sight at the campsite next to it, and I couldn’t resist a shot of all the yuelings  I guess our neighbors enjoyed themselves last night! We enjoyed another sausage and pancake breakfast made on our little charcoal grill and packed up our tent to head North for our next stop:  Bodie Lighthouse.

There was much deliberation about whether it was pronounced “Boh-dee” or “Bah-dee”.  At the gift shop we heard someone ask the clerk behind the counter, and he said it was “Bah-dee” pronounced just like Body.  So there you have it, in case you were curious.

the Bodie Island Lighthouse was built in 1872.  It was not open for climbing, but this house was a museum and gift shop with original artifacts from past lighthouse days as well as tales of bravery and stories about the shipwrecks and rescues.  I bought 2 postcards here to mail to my parents My mom loves lighthouses.

This next stop was a “must see” for us.  Eric LOVES everything to do with flight and planes and would love one day to have his license and be able to fly his own plane.  And of course, our “first in flight” motto that is on all our NC license plates hails the Wright Brothers as something North Carolina is proud of.  It was only $4 a person to get in, which was a much better deal than $7 per person just to climb a lighthouse  We enjoyed a very informative and extremely animated presentation from a park ranger (who had a strong minnesotan accent, very fun) telling the story of the wright brothers and showing us a full-scale reproduction of the 1902 glider and the 1903 flying machine they built:

She did such a great job that I felt on the edge of my seat the whole time with rapt attention, like a little kid being told a story  She spoke of the perseverance of these brothers, and hearing their story really inspired me to not be so quick to despair or give up hope when situations seem impossible.  But rather to press on, and not give up and the end result will be all the much more gratifying and exciting and rewarding!

Below is a picture of me balancing like I’m flying on the strip where the first plane left the ground on December 17, 1903:

Then we climbed the long hill to the Wright Brothers Monument on top of Kill Devil Hill.  I chose to have my picture taken in front of the phrase “Unconquerable Faith” because that is what I was most inspired by them to have.  That is what I took away as a lesson from my day there.

Now, Eric never wants his picture taken, but when I saw this, I could NOT resist, and he –surprisingly–haha, let me take his picture in front of this:

His mom always called him her little “evil genius” when he was growing up, so I thought she would get a kick out of this too

Our next stop was to visit the Currituck Beach Lighthouse in the town of Corolla. We passed through the town of “Duck” on our way and I really thought it was quite quaint and beautiful and that I’d come back to spend more time there and visit again.

Here, Eric put his creative talent to work by taking a picture of the lighthouse in the reflection of a window of a house in front of the lighthouse.

It was nice to be able to take our time and relax and enjoy some front-porch-sittin’

We were taking our time, as we had nowhere to be until 6pm when we were meeting up with my friend Erin at a beach house that she had rented for the week while she was on her R&R break. (She is the friend who gave us her motorcycle… the one who is in the Army, and was deployed to Afghanistan for her 2nd time) She “just happened” to be on her R&R and to be renting a beach house on the OBX for her family and friends the same week we were going to be traveling through the OBX.  What a blessing to be able to look forward to staying in a beautiful beach house after sleeping in a tent for 2 nights

We had a few more hours to kill, so we stumbled upon this walkway through the marsh at the Currituck Park and out to a pier where we saw different kinds of birds and blue crabs too…

kind of liked this close up shot of a fuzzy caterpillar.  Then we followed signs and came upon this cute house/coffee shop type place that also sold home made goods, wines and cheeses.  It was fun to just meander to the next place and not really have a plan, just to go where the signs took us and explore and stumble upon these places as we went…

As you can see, Eric was LOVING this little photo shoot I was doing…

Well, I guess I’ll close and let that sign speak for itself:  ”Come back for more later”…. as I will blog the final Day Four of our trip to the Outer Banks and our last day enjoying time w/Erin and her family at the beautiful beach house…