Many of you know that my sister-in-law Jennifer passed away in May of 2017. As you can imagine, being a single dad to 4 little kids has been REALLY, REALLY hard for my brother Ryan. In July of 2017, he met an amazing woman, Jamie, and they started dating. In October, I went home for Skylar’s homecoming, and they were just starting to talk about getting married, but hadn’t picked a date and Jamie hadn’t even met our family yet. We invited her to spend the weekend with our wild crazy family, we figured she would either survive being with ALL of us for a few days, or it might scare her away from our crazy crew!! {we are a lot when we are all together!}

I guess she decided she could handle us, because I had only been home to Chicago for a week or two when Ryan called and asked me if I would be willing to come back and take their engagement photos. {uhm, sure, why didn’t we just do it while I was there? Kidding, Sort of!!} We made arrangements for me to come the first weekend of December, and I was only going to be in Utah for a little over 24 hours. I PRAYED for good weather and a good day to take photos. I also prayed that I could keep control of 7 children under 11, that none of them would end of in the stream, {in hindsight, that might not have been our brightest idea}, and that we would get ONE good photo for the announcement!!

When we pulled up to the park, there were protesters EVERYWHERE, apparently we had just missed a rally at the capital building and we were stuck in the middle of everyone leaving. Luckily we found some parking and went to some stairs far away from the water and the protesters…and because prayers are answered the weather was beautiful and somehow we managed to get ONE almost perfect shot!! Oh man, they are CUTE together!!

Personally I think this one is my very favorite, maybe my favorite from all of last year. This is real life, especially with 7 kids!!

And because somehow everyone was cooperating {mostly} for a couple seconds, I was able to grab some individual shots of each of them. While I was trying to get a few shots of Ryan and Jamie {and while trying to make sure the kids weren’t in the water} we had a few little helpers who wanted to be a part of the action, I’m pretty sure this is going to be their new normal. {They better plan lots of getaways because there isn’t going to be any relaxing at home!} But man, these two have some CUTE kids!!!