I am trying to write this now at the end of July, so we’ll see how much of May and June I remember. The last month of school is always a little manic, but this year was especially so because we were so busy preparing for our big family trip to France as well.

We started May off with a concert. We went to see Jack White play at the Moody Theater, and given the rainy weather and the over-scheduling, we nearly didn’t make it in time. Sean tolerated the show for me, and I truly do appreciate it. It’s fun to watch someone who honestly seems like they’re having so much fun performing. White even popped over to the keyboards briefly when his pedal board died, and it was impressive how quickly his crew got things fixed.

Maya participated in her spring beginner band concert at school. It was impressive to see just how much they had improved since the concert in the fall. Unlike the fall concert, for spring, each section (woodwinds, brass, and percussion) had their own piece to perform. The woodwinds got to perform a bit of Over the Rainbow.

Sean tried an experiment to make clear ice. He purchased a rig that employs the concept of “directional freezing.” There’s a big insulated tub (like an itty bitty styrofoam cooler) into which sits some silicon layers that allow the cubes, the water you want, to sit on top and the water you don’t want to collect in the most insulated part of the tub at the bottom. The freezing happens from top to bottom, sort of leaving the impurities that have sunk down in the water to freeze last. It took a very long time for the ice to set up, but once it had done so, we had lovely blocks of clear ice to use in our cocktails. Neat!

Mother’s Day was pretty quiet. I got some kolaches for breakfast, which I love. Sean and the kids gave me a few gifts. We’re trying out a Made-In pan to replace an anodized aluminum one that I had used to death over the course of probably 20 years. Ian made me a snake shaped jewelry holder in his art class, which I have lovingly filled with jewelry.

We had a couple of freak 100 degree days in mid-May. That in combination with our near complete lack of spring rain felt like a harbinger of a terrible summer. (Now at the end of July, I know that not to be true, at least not in the way I was expecting.) Everything was a little slow to bloom, but it eventually did, and we enjoyed a fairly colorful early summer.

Maya managed to borrow a clarinet from school so she could start learning to play it for jazz band next year. We even worked out a single clarinet lesson before school was out, though she had already been messing around with it even before that.

Ian planted a couple kinds of watermelons. We purchased a plant that would produce yellow watermelons. And then we planted seeds from a package of the regular red kind. Everything was growing really well, and I had watered them as regularly as I could before we jetted off to France for a couple weeks.

Sean and I celebrated our 25th anniversary on May 28th. Given all the trip prep and end of school things we were doing, we didn’t really have time to give it much attention, but we did manage to sneak out for lunch that day. We went to a breakfast / home cooking place called Phoebe’s Diner, and it was delightful.

We decided for this big, slightly-more-than-two-week trip to France that we were going to each carry a big backpack with our stuff rather than pack suitcases. This would allow us to not have to deal with checking our bags for the flights. Given that we’d largely be using public transportation and would be moving between locations several times during the trip, it also gave us more mobility when boarding trains, or going up and down stairs to the metro, or walking down cobblestone streets, or hoofing it up several flights of stairs in an elevator-less building.

There are downsides, of course. We had to pack lighter, so we would need to do our laundry a few times while on vacation. Also, it would limit the quantity and type of souvenirs we could purchase, because we had limited space and everything had to be carry-on-friendly. Plus, no matter how well-positioned the packs are on your body, eventually some part of you will feel the weight.

We also made a few changes to limit our carry-on liquids. We tried out laundry detergent sheets, which seemed to work well enough. We bought a couple bars of soap that could be used for body, hair, or to hand wash clothing, if needed. We tried out this “crystal” deodorant that was made of mineral salts. You moisten it and apply it to clean arm pits and it inhibits odor causing bacteria. It seems to be more or less effective, but I’m not sure I’d want to go that route day-to-day.

We tried out a handful of shirts and socks that were all or partially made of merino wool. The idea is that they can be worn for a few days before they actually smell bad, and then once you do have to wash them, they dry really fast. And this seemed to prove out. However, they are expensive and not particularly durable, so I am personally still on the hunt for a better all-around solution.

Sean had purchased some packing cubes that could be compressed. I wasn’t really a believer in them before this trip. From my perspective, I thought that I could pack my stuff much tighter without the added material of a packing cube. As it happens, 1 – I’m not sure that is actually true, and 2 – it was really nice having things organized into the packing cubes, especially during TSA checks and the like.

The kids weren’t crazy about this style of traveling. In the past, they’d only been responsible for little backpacks that held mostly their loveys and their tech. Maya, who has to haul all her stuff around with her at middle school (since they have no lockers), adapted fairly quickly. Ian griped and complained and then did a good job of carrying his stuff around anyway.

Just before we left, Maya had her first visit to the orthodontist. After some imaging, they explained to us that yes, she would benefit from corrective treatment. In deference to her oboe and clarinet playing, we’re going to try to let her try out clear aligners. All of this would start though with a palate expander, which wouldn’t be placed till after vacation.

We went on our big family vacation to France, departing Friday June 6th and returning home Sunday, June 22nd. We went to Paris, of course spent a couple days in the Disney parks there (Walt Disney Studios Park and Disneyland Paris), visited Mont St Michel, saw Nimes and Pont du Gard, and then ended our time with a few relatively relaxing days along the south coast in Nice. Other than driving to and from the airport, we entirely took public transportation (metro, train, bus, tram) except for our trip from the airport to the city when we arrived in Paris because they canceled our train, and to our Eiffel Tower sunrise photo shoot, because it was so early the metro wasn’t actually running yet.

We arrived back in Texas very jet lagged, and me with a nasty cold-like virus of some kind. Sean and I went back to work. The kids lounged around the house. And we slowly, slowly returned things to normal. We were delighted to find that Ian’s yellow watermelon had a fruit on it, a first for us! It looked like the red watermelon plant had tried to fruit but that some creature was nibbling away the fruits before they really had much chance to develop.

And that’s it! We now have a 5th grader and a 7th grader. They have now visited a country where English isn’t the primary language. We came back to a weedy yard but had fruiting plants. Our cats had missed us, so we got tons of interaction for that last week and a half. And since we purposely didn’t schedule any summer camps in June, our poor mistreated children finally got to relax.

Back at the end of May, Sean and I quietly celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. Between the normal end of the school year craziness and final planning for our big France trip, the fact that we’d been married for a full quarter of a century had been swallowed up.

Twenty-five years is a long time, more than half my life, so far! We met in college in Missouri, both working at the radio station there and both pursuing electrical engineering degrees (though Sean already had his computer science degree – he just didn’t want to graduate).

We were married in Austin, Texas about a year after I graduated and took a job there. This was before we knew better than to schedule an outdoor event in central Texas at the end of May. Now we would probably make a different choice and avoid some of the sweat.

Through college, I drove a Plymouth Voyager that I had bought from my parents. It wasn’t the most glamorous choice perhaps, but the price was right, and it was a handy vehicle for hauling my belongings back and forth between college and co-op jobs and the like. As it happens, that was the car we were sharing when we first lived in Austin. And, as luck would have it, it managed to die during our wedding celebrations. Good thing we don’t believe in omens! Thankfully, Sean’s uncle Larry was able to help us get it lined out. Plus there were tons of family members in town to help with transportation as needed.

The car flaked out, one of my bride’s maids couldn’t make it because of a terrible family emergency, and it was awfully hot, but at the end of the night, we were married all the same, surrounded by family and friends.

The funniest part was our honeymoon. We went that October to Walt Disney World in Florida. The two of us knew each other well enough to have gotten married, but I was not prepared for Sean at Disney. Suddenly he’s awake and raring to go before the sun is up, making plans, mapping things out. It completely blind-sided me. On that same trip, he drove me to the coast for my first-ever glimpse of the ocean (Gulf of Mexico doesn’t count).

And then we lived our lives. We poured money into rent for a while, and then after a year or two, bought our first house up in Cedar Park. Then we both lost our jobs over the course of about a year. We had all made it safely past Y2K, but then the dot.com bubble burst and terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It was a weird and uncertain time. But we figured it out, together.

Ultimately, we found new jobs again, but spent a lot of time working way too hard to make sure we’d never be laid off again, me especially. If there was one thing I would consider changing about my mid to late 20s, it’s how much of my time and emotion I poured into my work life.

We moved closer to town, into the house we still live in today. We wanted a house with a pool, but the houses with pools in our price range were not awesome. I can’t speak for Sean, but I know I did exactly what you aren’t supposed to do when house hunting – I fell in love with the house, and so, in 2005, we moved in.

We had a few medical scares, ourselves and our loved ones. We took some trips. We saw some concerts. We worked on the house some. In 2006, I lost my mom. This was a tricky emotional thing for me, and I’d be lying if I said I handled it well. Sean was there through the whole mess. He stood with me when we stopped life support.

In 2012 or so, we decided that we weren’t getting any younger and that if we wanted a family, now was the time. I had multiple friends who struggled with fertility issues, so I was a little worried, but we had zero trouble. I can still remember the panicked / excited feeling when we had our first positive pregnancy test. Wow, it was that easy? Gold star to all those years of birth control.

We went to Bradley method childbirth classes and felt we were objectively prepared. We knew we were having a girl and that her due date was December 19th. We had just finished getting parts of the house repainted and both our furnaces and AC units replaced (that wasn’t planned). I went into labor a full month early (also not planned). We had been coached so much about false labor, we assumed that’s what was happening. After a couple phone calls with the OB, she eventually told Sean in a panic to bring me in. This all happened very quickly. We were at the hospital something like 18 minutes before Maya was born.

We liked the first kid so much, we decided she needed a sibling, and in 2014, Ian showed up a full six weeks before he was due. After a 4-week NICU stay, our family of four was united at last. And ever since, we’ve more or less chronicled our adventures on this web site.

Another big transitional time for us was COVID-19. In 2020, our 20th anniversary plans were dashed. Our plans to take Maya and Ian on their first Disney trip (a very big deal to Sean especially) were abruptly canceled. Astonishingly, our plans to send them to second grade and kindergarten were no more. Given all this, our plans to sleep or stay sane were likewise curtailed. We couldn’t travel. We couldn’t see family. I couldn’t visit my grandma and then in 2021, she died (not from COVID). We obsessively watched the statistics as the death toll from the disease grew and grew and grew.

Since then, whenever we think we should delay something, we often choose not to because you never know what’s coming. That’s always been true of course, but I think the COVID years really drove the point home.

In 2025, the year of our 25th anniversary, we chose to take the France trip we weren’t able to take in 2020. And we were taking the kids with us. As a 25th anniversary gift to ourselves, we hired a photographer to meet us at the Eiffel Tower before sunrise to take a whole series of family photos. After the fact, Sean and I realized that outside of school photos, these are the first professional family photos we’ve ever had taken. We are delighted with how they turned out.

I feel like I should be hitting more of our big life events in here, but maybe this is enough to remind ourselves that whatever the universe has chucked our way, good and bad, we’ve made it through, together. The current state of our country is difficult and uncertain. Our kids are on the cusp of being teenagers. And we’re old enough to start having involved conversations about how we want to prepare for and spend our post-40-hour-work-week lives. And we will continue to work our way through it, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.

[I am obligated to tell you that we worked with a lovely woman named Anais at The Parisian Photographers.]