Road Trip, Race Day, and Family Fun

We took a trip down to Charlotte in mid-November for Jason's Half-Marathon and had a wonderful weekend away as a family. We hit up some of our favorite restaurants, did some outlet shopping, went to the Mint Museum, and then explored the Africa side of the North Carolina zoo!! It was a busy, crazy weekend, and while it was fun, we ended up deciding to come home a day early since Josh had come down with a cold and we figured we needed some down time before the "work week" began.

I was SO incredibly proud of Jason in this race! He totally rocked the Charlotte Half Marathon (13.1 miles) in just over 1 hour and 40 minutes, reaching a new personal record! Way to go, Jason!!



Lauren was very excited to take some pictures of Daddy with her new camera! She looked so cute with her camera bag slung across her little body, acting like she was a total pro. :-)







Little Mr. Busybody fell asleep in the stroller on the way down to the race. Not even the loud music woke him up. Poor lil guy was plum tuckered out. :-)



After we left the race area, on our walk back to the hotel, we crossed back over the course of the full marathoners. We stopped for a little while so that we could cheer on the runners, which Lauren thoroughly enjoyed and did so with great enthusiasm! "GO RUNNERS" she yelled, as loud as she could, and rang her little cow bell!!





We took the kids to the Children's Area of the Mint Museum, which is right in Uptown Charlotte, just blocks from where our hotel was. They had a great time building, exploring, drawing, and playing and it really was not busy at all, which was so nice.











The day that we left Charlotte, we drove to Asheboro,NC and checked out the North Carolina Zoo. It's divided into two main sections, by continents: North America and Africa. Since we were mainly interested in the large animals on the Africa side, we decided to stick with that. This zoo is over 500 acres of animal habitats with about 5 miles of pathways connecting it all. This was one of those times when I was REALLY thankful for the sit & stand (double) stroller that we have, because there is no way that we would have been able to see as much as we did without it. Lauren could hop off and explore and check things out (and take pictures!) and then she could hop back on again if she wanted to get a break from walking. It was a great adventure and we took a bunch of pictures - too many to post here, but I'd say the highlight of our day there was when this...



...baby chimpanzee came right up to the glass in front of Lauren and gave her a BIG KISS!! It was fabulous!! I've never seen such an excited yet bewildered look on Lauren's face before! Absolutely priceless!


You can sort of see "the kiss" in this picture - and the boy who was next to Lauren pointing at the baby chimp. Everyone that was standing right there was cheering her on and laughing when (he?) actually came up to her and put (his?) mouth to the glass! One of the cutest things ever.