To our dear friends and family,
Please accept this electronic message of season's greetings and yuletide cheer. Work and travel plans this year did not allow us time for our semi-traditional photo and letter that we have sent out since 2005—give or take a year.
Having reached a certain age, we have received a growing number of Christmas cards featuring our friends and relatives with their increasing numbers of children. This year saw cards featuring only the children, with the parents only noted as the senders. Not having children, and not wanting to be left out of this trend, I've included a few photos of our friends' children I've been fortunate enough to photograph in the past few weeks. You'll find them below.
Two-thousand seven presented Julie and I with more challenges than we had anticipated for our first year of marriage. New careers, and promotions, along with sicknesses and deaths in Julie's family supplied more drama than we needed. But we have weathered the year unbroken and are looking forward to an exciting 2008.
In January I began a new job developing the Hillary Clinton web site. Campaign work is extremely rewarding, but the long hours, frantic pace and significance of the job occasionally lead to daydreams of packing my camera and GPS in a backpack and hiking the Appalachian Trail for six months. Very soon though, the efforts of our first year-long endeavor will be realized with the Iowa Caucus on January 3rd and New Hampshire's primary five days later. With any luck, we'll then begin the general-election campaign. Please vote for Hillary and keep me employed.
I must now take this opportunity to thank Julie for her patience and understanding this past year. She used to be accustomed to arriving home from work each evening with dinner waiting on the table. Now we're lucky if we eat two dinners a week with each other. It's been difficult to juggle work and marriage (and Louie, of course), but I'm managing better than many people. Thank goodness we don't have children yet.
Julie had a much rougher year than I, with cancer affecting both her uncle and mother. Early in the year Julie's uncle died from a brain tumor. He had been in remission for over a decade, but the tumor came back and there was nothing the doctors could do. Soon after, Julie's mother, Cathy, was diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer. Thankfully, after an extensive surgery and months of chemotherapy, she is now cancer-free.
While Cathy was undergoing treatment, Julie spent a good deal of time in California helping out her mother around the house and with daily chores. Despite the frequent trips, Julie became a fully licensed social worker and received two raises and a promotion this year at the MS Society. She no longer has to deal with equipment logistics and mundane transportation requests and is now focused on respite for caregivers and guiding the many local MS support groups.
With all of the drama in our lives we didn't have as much leisure time as we would have liked, but we spent much of our spring and summer weekends biking around DC and took a few short trips when we could. We attended the weddings of Julie's brother Danny and of our friends Mirellise and Tom. The latter was my first paid wedding as a photographer, which was quite a learning experience. Aside from wedding-related travel I took a wonderful four-day scuba diving trip to the Cayman Islands in July. It's been six months since that trip and I'm eager to get back underwater again.
That about wraps it up for 2007. Below are the promised photos of cute children.
Baby Naia (two days old)
Brothers Joey and Anthony
Brent (just hanging around)
