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.]