Our Story
My husband, K, and I most likely met for realsies our freshman year of high school. We were in the same English classes in 9th and 10th grades before he left high school in the dust for a program called Running Start at our local community college.
Fast forward about six or seven years and we re-met in our hometown in 2007. We started dating, but I moved away to Nashville for graduate school and broke things off. Turns out, we’re terrible at breaking up, because in a one year span, we got back together and broke up two more times before finally getting back together for good. We kept talking to one another through e-mail and on the phone, which, as we learned, is really not conducive to staying broken up.
After we became a for sure thing, we became engaged before I moved to Maui to start my teaching career. K moved there a year later, and we married in July 2011. We stayed on Maui for a total of seven years before moving back to our hometown two months prior to the birth of our daughter, Fi, in 2016.
We are still living in our hometown and are enjoying exploring the Pacific Northwest as much as we can. We’re becoming better parents everyday, and are having so much fun with our daughter. I’m not sure what our future holds, but I’m pretty excited to find out.
Why I Don’t Call Them By Their Real Names on the Blog
On this blog, I frequently refer to my husband as K and my daughter as Fi. Those, of course, are not their real names.
Back in 2012, I started a different blog that I abandoned after only a few posts. At the time, I didn’t even consider whether my husband wanted to be a part of the blog or whether he would like anyone who ever Googled him to be taken to a post about a dinner we made one evening or to another post with a somewhat unflattering picture of him. I didn’t mind if people all over the world could peek in on my life, so why would he mind?
Well, he did mind. When I started this blog, I at least had the consideration to ask him this time around whether he wanted to be a part of it. That’s when I learned he really didn’t like that picture popping up in a search of his name. So I decided to call him by his first initial so that nothing on this site will be retrieved when people Google him.
For similar reasons, I have shortened my daughter’s name to Fi. The other half of her name is “ona”, so you can put those two parts together and figure out her real name. When Fi is older and applying to colleges (please go to college, Fi), I don’t want any college admissions director doing a search on her name and finding posts and pictures of her from when she was a toddler. They may be cute, but Future Fi is a serious academic deserving of every single scholarship a college has to offer (right?) and no adorable baby pictures are going to mar that scholarly image.
Also, even though she’s little and can’t speak for herself, that doesn’t give me the right to splash everything about her life out for the world to gobble up. My goal is to not post anything that she’ll come to me in ten or fifteen years saying, “Mom, I really wish you hadn’t written that about me.” I have to keep in mind that even though she’s my child, she is not my property. It’s best that she shapes the image she wants to present to the world on her own. It’s not my job to do that for her.