Category Archives: family

A Black Hills Easter

April 4, 2018

This Easter, we headed to our new cabin in the Black Hills, Sheep Hill Chalet. I love hunkering into a vacation home with the family on holidays! And the Hills are gorgeous right outside our windows! It snowed a TON! We were definitely stuck inside two of the days, but it wasn’t so bad with the cozy fire and huge windows to look at all the beauty around you!

On Easter morning, Ivy woke up bright and early and was dressed in her Easter best the second she woke up! She couldn’t wait to do the Easter egg hunt and get her basket! It had snowed so much the day before Easter that we were forced to have an indoor egg hunt. Fun for them to explore the new cabin!

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Christmas 2017

December 26, 2017

Merry Christmas!! The best day of the year came and went and what a joyous holiday it was! This year was so memorable with three littles experiencing the magic of Santa and the love of baby Jesus! John and I said at the end of the night last night that it was our favorite year yet. Ivy and Leo are at such a fun age learning everything there is to know about Santa and baby Jesus. It was such a pleasure teaching them all the joy of Christmas!

Our fun started on Christmas Eve Eve when we were able to see Santa again! This got the kids so excited! Favorite photo with Santa! Except bummer he wasn’t holding Faye too! :( Oh well!

Christmas Eve was pretty easy going for us in the morning. We spent it watching Rudolph for the 100th time and I started prep for hosting Christmas Eve dinner. We enjoyed church celebrating Jesus and singing gorgeous Christmas songs (always tear up at the candlelit Silent night!), then headed back to our house for a prime rib dinner. YUMM! It was relaxing and so nice being surrounded by our families. Ivy and Leo got to open a few presents and their Christmas pjs from Grandma Betsy and Grandpa Dan and Santa even made a visit!

The next morning was CHRISTMAS!!!!!! Ivy walked ran into our room and said, “It’s CHRISTMAS!!!” She was so excited she could hardly stand it! She sat by the tree so patiently until Leo was up and ready. They ravaged through all their presents in about .2 seconds and were so happy with all of their new fun things to play with!! And Faye was so cute in her Baby’s First Christmas outfit!

Our last baby’s first Christmas :( :(  After the mess was picked up (yeah right, house is still a disaster), we headed to brunch at John’s parent’s house and enjoyed mimosas and a yummy egg bake! The rest of the day was relaxing and so nice to enjoy Christmas with our family. John and I even said at the end of the night how perfect the last two days were. So fortunate for our family and friends and getting to be with loved ones for the holiday.

Hope you all had a very Merry Christmas!!! He is Risen!


 

 

 

Christmas Card 2017

December 12, 2017

Presents in your mailbox every day season! Or Amazon Prime boxes at your doorstep! lol! I love this time of year! It’s so fun to get Christmas cards from your family and friends. I love seeing everyone’s family photos and how grown up the kids get each year! And my favorite is to hang up all the cards so your loved ones are seen each day! It’s the one time of year to catch up on relationships and families, I love a little blurb on the back of cards!

This year (and every year), I went with Minted for our card. Minted is a design marketplace. They source creative content from a global community of independent artists, they have artists from all 50 states and over 60 countries! I always find my favorite design on this site, not to mention their cardstock is superb and the cards have exceptional photo quality. BEST OF ALL – is the address recipient printing, for FREE. Saves me so much time instead of writing all the addresses with my 4th grade handwriting. Plus, there’s a design that matches your card (or choose a different design), so it makes for a beautifully festive envelope.

We chose the Simply Serene design, it matched our photo perfectly and I love the minimalist design. I love cards where the photo does the talking, so this simple style was perfect. Here are some of my other favorites I posted a while back.

A tip! Always put the year on your card! I keep one of ours each year and it’s so fun to go back and see them all as we grow up.

Here’s our card! Merry Christmas! :)


Fall Family Photos // 2017

December 9, 2017

Baaaasically have dropped off the face of the Earth with this blog, sooooorrry! Don’t know WHERE all my free time has gone (taking care of three kids, ohhh). Meant to do this post about a month ago, oops, so here we go finally :)

We took our family photos with Michell Strizhius back in October when it was still so beautiful out! Missing that perfect fall weather right now. But! Excited to share these now. We went downtown again this year for our photos. I love all of the different feels you can have throughout the streets. We did a little bit of trees look along the bike trail, then a little bit of neat walls and buildings around 8th and Railroad. Loved all the different looks!

It was definitely harder wrangling three kids this year. We didn’t have enough hands to keep our kids by our sides and Leo’s hands out of his mouth! But, those photos are some of my favorites, remembering the behind the scenes makes me chuckle! Anyways, here are some of my favorites! Ivy absolutely kills me with her poses! The best.

Still wild seeing our family of 5! Next year’s photos Faye will be WALKING! EEEP! How are we ever going to wrangle them all then?! :)


My shirt // Posh Boutique
Ivy’s Dress // Old Navy
Leo’s Pants and Shirt // Zara
John’s Shirt // JH and Sons


 

Happy Halloween

October 31, 2017

Happy Halloweeeeeeeen! Hope you all had a spooky night and had fun trick-or-treating! We had a BLAST and the kids were like crazy lunatics going from house to house! Leo ESPECIALLY loved it. He was all over the place! Mostly dodging scary werewolves and other freaky creatures, but when there wasn’t something spooky in his way, he was running for candy. Kinda loving this age. So young and still scared, but enamored with all things festive and excited about Halloween and trick-or-treating! So much fun with these little goblins! Faye stayed nice and warm snuggling with Emmie and Papa Koch while we were out with the other two. She will be cruising with them next year!

Ivy’s pose, LOL. She’s got that princess thing down! Ivy wanted to be Belle this year so that was easy!

Leo struggled with his costume. I showed him about 57 different costumes he might like, took him to Target AND the halloween store, and he would NOT pick one out! He kept saying he wanted to be “nothing” and would never pick one out, uhhhh! The only one he liked was a DIY bulldozer one I found, but yeah right, never got around to that, NOR am I crafty enough for that to turn out right! So we finally found a Blaze (Nickelodeon show) costume with inflatable tires which was awesome because he’s obsessed with all things trucks, but one of the tires got a hole in it this weekend while we were at a Halloween party. Shoot! So, we had this pumpkin in their costume closet and he was happy to be it! All worked out! WHEW.

Me and mah girls!!!

A vampire and his witch. John even did his own makeup, good job!!!!

Koch Kiddos! Love those three little goblins

Now let the trick-or-treating begin!

Such a blast! Now time to dive into their candy buckets and steal all their sugar and anything sour! I don’t like chocolate (I know I’m weird!)! Nerds and fun-dips please!

How many stomach aches are we going to have in the next few days?! :)