Five years

Five years ago today (well, okay, so it's five years ago tomorrow, if you want to get really technical about it), it was September 16, 2008.  If there was ever a date that changed history, it's that one.  Hmm, to revise that, it was a date that changed the course of the Smith family lives!

For starters, my parents bought a house that day.  That's a big deal.  The address of that house is still our USA address and a lot of good stuff has taken place there.

Also on that date, my sister Alyssa gave birth to the first niece/grandchild in the Smith family - Alaythia Esther Vikesland was born!

Since I'm not sure how my sister feels about having her post-birth hospital picture on the blog, you get one of me, the hesitant new auntie, instead.  I'd never held such a tiny, brand-new baby before and was kind of anxious about it!

Five years later, Alaythia is a beautiful, smart (duh, did we expect otherwise from Alyssa's progeny?!), and stylish little girl.

Five years ago, Alyssa was laboring in the hospital, and now she's laboring again, frosting cupcakes and wrapping My Little Ponies for a big birthday shabang to commemorate the day she added motherhood to her list of accomplishments, just in case PhD wasn't enough (although at that time she wasn't quite a doctor just yet).

And, in case my parents and sister all doing something really big on the same date wasn't enough, Andrew decided to make it a pretty significant date for me, too.  On September 16, 2008, he asked me out on a date.  We'd met just four days earlier, and I'd never been asked on a date in my life, so that e-mail just about made me fall off my chair!  I don't have a picture of us together until November of that year, but here we are together at Thanksgiving:

Five years later, here we are on our second term together in Tanzania, and we have a BABY!  Crazy!  Here's to five fabulous years of twitterpation.