A Year of Firsts

I thought it might be a good idea, in the aftermath, to write a little bit about our first Christmas as a married couple. In fact, I'm fairly certain we'll be thinking about the next year as a bunch of "firsts". However it didn't feel all that first-y.

Emerson and I have been together over five years and have lived together for a good portion of that so I was honestly more excited about it being the puppy's first Christmas with us than our own. I know, that makes me a horrible person. Or perhaps it's just a reflection of our relationship. As my father said in his toast at the wedding, if you don't think Michael and Emerson are really married, spend five minutes with them.


It was a Christmas of firsts in other aspects. Emerson finally got to eat his first New Haven pizza and, as predicted, it was better than any other pizza on the face of the planet. We bought our first tuxedos (more on that later). And for the first time we bought each other the same gift!


It was also a Christmas of babies. On our ride up to Connecticut to visit my family, we stopped by Princeton to see our friends Patrick and Jennifer (who was an extremely pregnant reader at the wedding) and their new son, Emmett. We also got to play Santa to our neighbor's newborn nephew; his sister lives in New Haven and so we drove presents up to them. My cousin just had a baby, as well, and so we got to play with her at my grandparents.

And this whole year is going to be a bunch of firsts in other ways. I'm looking forward to finally getting in front of a classroom and expounding upon the beauty of biophysics. And now that we're married and "settled" down, it's time to start thinking about that first house down-payment. And whether or not we think about any seasonal marker as our first "X" as a married couple, the one thing I know for certain is that, more importantly than this being a "year of firsts", everything that happened last year was a "year of lasts."