Hello hello! I’m hiding in my room, eating chips and guac while my kids watch movies downstairs. This buys me twenty minutes, maybe. (Lily is absolutely relentless, and wants to play Barbies constantly. #help) Life has changed just a little bit for all of us, hasn’t it?! How are we all doing? Are you hanging […]

Alyssa and Jim!! What a wedding, what a couple!! They first met in the wintertime, they took a magical walk in the snow on their first date, and during a snowboarding trip, Jim proposed to Alyssa on the top of a mountain in Colorado!! When we first sat down to talk about their wedding last […]

I’m watching the snow melt in our backyard this afternoon, and I’m looking at the forecast — FIFTY-TWO degrees on Sunday! What?! I’ve missed all this bright, beautiful sunshine, and it makes me want to deep clean my house or go for a five-mile run or something bonkers like that. Lily has been crying because […]

Winter engagement sessions in the Midwest can be a challenge, because everything is dead and there isn’t much color to add a vibrant pop to photos! However, if you work hard and find the right locations, you can make anything look bright and dreamy… and that’s exactly what we did for Ripki and Bryan’s engagement […]

Most people hear the words “Family Photos!!” at a wedding and cringe. They might think of endless combinations of people, and lots of painful waiting around while the cocktail hour ticks away without them 😉 But wait! Family formal portrait time doesn’t have to take LONG, and it doesn’t have to be painful! Here are […]

Anna wore her sister’s veil, her grandmother’s earrings, and her great-grandmother’s necklace. Her wedding dress was covered in the most intricate needlework of delicate floral vines (she’s getting a PhD in horticulture after all!!). They shared traditional wedding vows, a gentle nod to the millions and millions of marriages that have gone before theirs. Anna […]

I’m not sure if you’re anything like me, but my tendency is to always do what’s most comfortable, to pick the easiest way, and to do whatever is most familiar. I love predictable routines, habits, and lots and lots of lists (!!). But I also know that when I’m living that easy, predictable, smooth-as-vanilla-ice-cream life, […]

Wow, what a year! Maybe it’s a little early for end-of-the-year reflections (we haven’t even hit Christmas yet!), but 2019 was a game-changer in so many ways! There were so many unexpected surprises (and curveballs!), and I’m grateful for the lessons I learned, and the ones I’m still learning. We shot a whole bunch of […]

If you’ve been around here awhile, you’ll remember this post from last year, documenting our first-ever for-real Christmas tree experience. After ten years with an artificial Christmas tree, we’re now solidly on the REAL-X-MAS-TREES-4-LIFE team!! We had planned to make the drive to cut down our tree again this year, but things got busy, the […]

I am such a huge fan of Airbnb! I guess there are a bunch of others home rental options, like VRBO or HomeAway, but we’ve only used Airbnb and we’ve loved it. We’ve used Airbnb to stay in a cozy cabin on the Lake Michigan coastline, a fresh, beautiful townhouse in the suburbs of Minneapolis, […]