For our family’s exploration of beautiful Paris, my wife did a tremendous job of reserving a perfect little cottage only a few blocks from the famous avenue of Champs Élysées. Less than a 10-minute walk from shops to explore, restaurants to splurge, deserts to indulge in, and majestic monuments in every direction. One of my…
Sometimes it’s just fun being a kid. And let’s face it, we could all use a little more kid in us. To celebrate my wife’s 40th and bring an incredible experience to the family, we ventured off to London and Paris over the kids’ spring break. One of the spots we eyed for our first…
Every endeavor we face will typically have 2 buckets – one bucket of what we can control and one bucket of what’s uncontrollable. We’ve heard it plenty of times and I’ve mentioned this concept more times than I can count, focus on the controllable bucket, and make the most out of it. I remain a…
The calendar officially flipped to March and here we are already over 8 weeks into 2024. For many of our 2024 goals, reality has hit, and motivation has slowly crept away. Now, we’re simply left staring at 2024 goals with a key question, am I done with these goals or am I ready to build…
We rounded out a 4+ month long season of 2nd grade basketball this past Sunday. I can tell some kids are ready for the next adventure while others will miss the opportunities we have had as a team. As the wind down process takes place – could be a team, season, project, event, etc. – there’s…
Anyone else tend to fall in love with puzzles during wintertime? The recent puzzle my wife and I challenged ourselves to seemed to have similar shades of color all throughout the picture. The start of the puzzle was painful (at least for me) – trying to figure out what section to start with, separating colors…
The Kansas City Chiefs are looking to be the first back-to-back Super Bowl champion since 2004-2005 when the New England Patriots won back-to-back championships. With all the incredible teams and athletes year in and year out, why has there not been a back-to-back champion in almost 2 decades? 32 teams start each year with a…
One of the great benefits of working at Principal Financial Group is their workout facility. The workout facility has just about every option of exercise you can think of, including the opportunity to take bootcamp classes. For those unfamiliar with bootcamp classes, while each class is different, it typically is structured in the form of…
A pet peeve I’ve learned over the past couple years is it drives me crazy when my kids leave their lights on in their bedrooms. I get it, total 1st world problem, but I’m sure many parents can empathize. The other day I walked into one of my kids’ rooms in the middle of the day,…
The past couple of weeks in Iowa have been a flurry of snow and sub-zero temps. Towards the middle of this fun weather came a random day where the temperature got to 20 degrees. It was amazing how good 20 degrees felt. Strange to say how exciting 20 degrees is but when our benchmark is…
