Mother's Day with our Family :)

Mother's day was especially bittersweet this year as we celebrated our first one without Berta.  We knew it would be a hard weekend and there was no getting around it, but it also was so nice to have Dan's family in town especially this weekend in particular.  We wanted to celebrate Berta, but overall it was just a sad day.  And we knew it would be, and we were so glad we could be together for it.  From the beginning I have been in such awe of how Dan's family has been so supportive and loving of each other through one of the hardest times in their lives.  And on a much much smaller scale I saw that this weekend as they literally flew / drove into town and helped us with probably 150 projects around the house (I'm not kidding when I say they pretty much worked with us the whole weekend except when we went to church and brunch - they even watched the kids while I did a photo session!).  They were just the sweetest and we were so thankful they were here with us.  It makes me sad we aren't all closer but we definitely cherished the times we are together :)

(the last picture is Ben running out to give me a picture the boys painted for me :) )

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A Little Photo Shoot Scouting

So there were quite a few photo shoot scouting sessions this spring!  I have a couple session locations that I loooove to shoot at, however I am finding a lot of my clients tend to live closer to the city and Barrington is quite the haul.  I feel like Barrington has some beautiful locations, but I really wanted to check out some places in Schaumburg so we headed out to Busse woods one day to check out a couple places and found a cute bridge, path, and log.  Naturally I took some photos of the kids and we played around a bit since they were being troopers!  Here's some of the shots I took plus a few extra popsicle shots :)

Spring, Playgrounds, and Zippers

At around this time (probably week 4 of being home?!) I was starting to pull out my camera more!  Not only were we going outside but we were all starting to adjust back to normal sleep patterns, and the boys were starting to get used to being home.  Although there were still temper tantrums and sharing issues, I felt like everyone was more relaxed and finding their place which I was very thankful for!

Although it was spring, we still had quite a few chilly days as you can tell by the coats in the playground pictures below, so I put Cole in this cute little zip up sweatshirt outfit and I couldn't help but crack up as he was trying to figure out how to get the zipper down!  And when we finally did the look on his face was priceless :)  Oh our little Cole how we love him!