{ RAQUELEANNE }: Engaged Encounter

Guess what?! In five months, Juan and I are getting married and officially starting our family of three!!! This past weekend we spent our weekend up in Oceanside at the San Luis Rey Mission. for our Engaged Encounter weekend. I'm not going to lie...we were both a little anxious. Neither one of us are fans of having our entire weekend planned out without any say in what we will be doing. Not to mention the fact that we slept in the old mission living quarters a hand reach away from complete strangers, shared community bathrooms and were not given an itinerary (we were literally at the mercy of the retreat planners from sun up to well past sun down). Although it was exhausting it was a great experience. Our roommates were a very nice couple and the retreat leaders were two wonderful couples who shared some amazing personal stories, opening up their hearts and in turn helping us open ours. The priest who was the spiritual leader of the retreat was fascinating. Juan and I sat with him over a couple of the meals and really enjoyed getting to know him. Although it was a long tiring weekend it really did help prepare us for this next chapter. One of my favorite moments was late one evening, they had us stand up, I thought we were just going to do a stretch because we had been sitting for a while. They had the men place their hands palms up inside the ladies palms and proceeded to talk about those hands and then we switched and they talked about the ladies hands. I was bawling. Those are some very special hands. I can't wait to hold them at the altar, see them hold our first child, our grandchildren and watch them grow old and wrinkly.