We're all holding presents, but one of them is bigger than the others. After putting almost 200,000 miles on her old one, Sue got a new car. That's the owner's manual in her lap.

This was also our first Christmas in the remodeled living room.

Noah's holding a reindeer that sings "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer." It's from his grandma, of course.

Noah started kindergarten in September, but by Christmas he'd been moved up to first grade.

The tree looks the same in all of these pictures because it sort of is. We've always gotten Frasier firs.

My mom got Zoe an American Girl doll that looks just like her. She even got glasses the following year, right after Zoe did. Zoe's not very dollish generally, but her Girl is always dressed for the season.

NewTek had just hired me to write the SDK documentation for LightWave.

My mom bought Christmas vests for Noah, my dad, and me. I always wear mine when I dress up for the holidays now.

Zoe always enjoyed having her picture taken, but even after two years, it's hard to get Noah to sit still for one.

Noah's first Christmas. This was also the year of our first family trip to Disney World, and the year I created my first web page and sold my first plug-in to NewTek.

I'm in sweats because I have a cold or something, one of many minor illnesses Zoe brought home to me from daycare.

Sue seemed immune, but in the last few months of her pregnancy she'd had terrible indigestion. Noah was born a couple of weeks later.

You might notice the slight swelling under my left eye. About a month later I needed some surgery to fix that. We never figured out the cause.

Zoe's first Christmas. She fell in love with one of the tree ornaments, a gold and purple star. She took it off the tree and crawled away with it whenever she thought I wasn't looking.

I remember feeling like I hadn't slept in weeks. Zoe was born just a few days after this was taken.

We finished an upstairs bedroom that would become the nursery. Apparently the previous owner's kids had used the unfinished room for interesting forms of entertainment. A number of BB pellets fell out of the old insulation when we tore it down.

I'd just been awarded Phase I of my SBIR.

The big house project was the renovation of the basement. A few years later, when Zoe needed a bedroom, I moved my office down there.

Our first Christmas in the new house. During the previous ten months, I spent a lot of time with my father-in-law getting a crash course in home improvement and repair.

Notice we brought our living room curtains with us from the apartment.

On the day after Christmas, Sue found our house. We'd been searching since summer and I was pretty discouraged, so I had to be talked into going back to see it. We moved in two months later.

Sue's parents bought me an Amiga computer the previous spring, and by Christmas, I was doing odd jobs in computer graphics.

Our first Christmas as a married couple. Using a slice of the tree trunk and this picture, we made an ornament that's been on our tree ever since, even though we now barely recognize these young and blissfully ignorant people.