Family Pictures with a Family Update

January 31, 2019

Family Pictures with a Family Update

It feels like we've had years of life happen since my last post just less than 2 months ago. On December 14th we closed on house (!!!), the 15th we moved, the next week I was sick and we had some pretty serious home maintenance to attend to. Then we travelled for 2 weeks for the holidays, then came back to getting some pretty major work done on the house, and finishing unpacking. The last 2 weeks have been Michael and I switching off colds, and preparing for Michael to move to Seattle for work for 6 months.

Oh yeah, did I mention that MICHAEL IS MOVING TO SEATTLE FOR 6 MONTHS??

Literally days before we closed on our house, Michael got his official offer to be a roaster at the new Starbucks opening on Michigan Ave. later this year. Seriously, the dream job for him. And the dream training, since it will take place in Seattle. We thought that maybe (hopefully) the whole family would be moving out with him. It hasn't work out that way, but we are looking forward to keeping up with our normal routine here in Chicago (especially after so much transition), and of course visiting Michael in Seattle!

We've been flying through a long laundry list of to-do's before he leaves, mostly things related to the house and technology, haha! But at top at the top of our list was getting some family pictures taken. We're coming up on almost 2 years since we last had them done! Michael used to work with Ian of Rempel Photography, so we were excited to have him take some pictures of us before Michael leaves. I'm so glad we squeezed it in when we did!

I've always wanted to have winter pictures taken, and these turned out so, so good. If you too ever want to have your pictures taken in an actively-snowing situation, your hair WILL get weird and you'll just have to be okay with it. I think I'm there.

For the location, we went back to a familiar pocket of the West Loop that was not far from our old apartment. The Ace Hotel is one of the more kid-friendly coffee spots in the city, since you can order from Stumptown and then hangout in the spacious lobby of the hotel. (Also, the Ace Hotel workers were super helpful and gracious with us when we were there! And thankfully there weren't many other guests in the lobby at the time.) After that we walked down Morgan to Dorite Donuts. I think it was a pretty good plan for the boys to have donuts to look forward to at the end of the session. ;) But really, they did a great job! A lot of that was Ian taking candid photos amidst the poses, and switching up the poses pretty quickly. Getting outside and into the cold was also a fun and invigorating way to mix it up.