25Apr

Wife Swap: The Default Parent Edition

This past year has been the hardest year of my life, which is why I have been so quiet and am only catching up now. I have so much to share, but always seem to choose sleep over anything else when given the opportunity for “mama time” and my businesses inevitably suffered. Fast forward to 2023 and I am living my best life, and I am here to share with you what I changed to
04Nov

Little Man’s First Halloween 2022

This year was a year full of firsts: little man’s first Halloween, his first walk outside, and little miss’ first time actually collecting goodies (and she actually got to eat a few!). PSA: Handing out apple sauce, juice boxes, mini notebooks, etc. is totally awesome for young children and/or allergies. It was also filled with traditions: our letterboard made an appearance with an update (nut allergy), my parents came to visit and took turns going
11Feb

My First Week Back Solo Parenting (& Being The Default Parent)

I have been a work-from-home boss for as long as I can remember. I took on the added challenge of a baby in 2019, the worldly turmoil swept the little control I had from me in early 2020, I had a second baby in 2021, and now in 2022 my husband just started back at work after the end of his parental leave for our second child and I am back solo parenting while running
21Jan

A Photo Is Worth A Thousand Words, But Are You Seeing The Right Ones?

A photograph is worth a thousand words of physical descriptions and doesn’t always tell the full story of what is happening when that photo was captured or what lead up to it. Like all the cute baby pictures you see online… What is happening behind the scenes of that photo is often very different from the resulting image. Let’s take this set as an example. YOU see an adorable little boy snuggling up to his
31Dec

Christmas 2021 – Skipping The Holiday Traditions

Okay, so perhaps “skipping” is too harsh of a word because we didn’t skip Christmas entirely, it was just not a priority this year to keep with all the traditions since we had just welcomed our baby earthside and were running on no sleep and not accepting any visitors. My level of commitment this year was that the tree was UP—there were no ornaments, not even a topper or a base—but to be fair, I
22Dec

Baby Boy Is Here!

He’s here! He is absolutely beautiful, strong (and strong-willed just like his sister!), and born at over nine pounds and growing so fast! You can read all about our birth story too, but for now a big thank you to our photographer, Lisa Johnson, for these amazing keepsakes from our first portrait session as a full family and I am so excited for our matching frame to arrive from our previous session when little miss
04Dec

Our Birth Story

On the eve of my due date, the contractions officially started. Thankfully they subsided right as I was wanting to sleep, and I fully expected them to start up again early the next morning like the last time. Nope. But they came in full force that night as I settled in to sleep. Great. All through the night, waking me every 10-15 minutes, well into the next evening. Consistent, but not close enough together to
05Nov

Stephanie & Alex’s Maternity Photos In Almonte

For those of you who know how physically demanding this pregnancy has been, you may be surprised to see that I waited so long to do our maternity photos this time around, but I am so glad that we held out until the fall to get to enjoy our warm fall colours, and that we could have them done in our new forever home town of Almonte was a big bonus. Our photographer Bry Marie
02Nov

When Experiences Matter Most | Halloween 2021

This year for Halloween, we kept to the traditional sense of things, but still made sure to focus on the experience rather than things. Little miss enjoyed herself so much this weekend because she got to dress up as her favourite food, take several walks around the block (even the dark, which she looooved!) over the course of a few days, learn to blow bubbles from a wand, and make pumpkin goodies from scratch with
27Oct

The Second Pregnancy Hits Different

I quite enjoyed my first pregnancy, only had a couple of weeks of nausea (which was solved by strawberries and cheese bread!), and didn’t feel too much pain in the end and would have happily gone the extra two weeks. But this pregnancy has been really hard on me, physically and emotionally. The morning (ahem, all day and night) sickness ripped through me for months, and when I finally rid myself of that side effect,