Our Next Great Adventure

Alison and I are thrilled to announce the beginning of our next great adventure – we'll be welcoming a new addition to our family in 2024.

While some of our closest friends and family have known about our desire to have a child for a while, the journey wasn't without its challenges. Bodies and hormones don't always cooperate, and the process took a bit longer than we anticipated. When we discovered Alison was pregnant a few days before my 34th birthday, it caught us by surprise. Although we knew it was a possibility, the reality was both exciting and a little overwhelming. It took a few hours for it to sink in, but once it did, we were both giddy with joy.

Reflecting on the path that brought us to this moment, Alison and I deliberately chose to delay having children early in our marriage, a decision quite unconventional in Utah.  Living in Utah means there is a lot of social pressure to marry at a young age and begin having children as quickly as possible. We are lucky because our families, for the most part, did not pressure us or ask about when we would have children. (I think some have begun to think we may never have children). Still, the pressure is there. Most of our friends have somewhere between two and four kids. Many of them are done having children. Their oldest children are teenagers. As our friends embraced parenthood, it was tempting to second-guess our decision, but we stuck to our plan.

Alison and I have, mostly, wanted to have kids. We just didn’t want them right away. We are planners so timing was crucial for us. When we were first married I had years of schooling ahead of me. It seemed like an easy decision to wait until I was done. Then while I was completing my master's in accounting Alison made the decision to pursue an MBA. This also did not feel like the right moment to have a child. We waited. When Alison was finishing her MBA we built our first house. We built this house with children in mind. We planned bedrooms and spaces for them. For years these rooms remained empty. We moved into the house and Alison graduated from the MBA program we still did not feel ready to be parents. Instead, we focused on traveling the world and sharing a life we loved.

Slowly and surely the pressures of time began to feel more substantial. Our conversations became more serious. We worked through whether or not we even wanted to have children. We agreed we did. We made a plan. Then a global pandemic enveloped the world and shattered our plans. Once again we found ourselves playing the waiting game. Somehow without kids, we outgrew the first house and so we built another house - once again with kids in mind. This house took too long to build, making the waiting game feel almost unbearable. We knew which bedroom we would turn into a nursery, but we didn’t often say it out loud since having kids was not a foregone conclusion for us. In many ways, we were preparing to come to terms with whatever life brought. 

The waiting game felt hard in Utah. We already knew we would be the old parents in our children’s social groups. There have been many times when I personally dealt with anxiety that maybe we waited too long. Whenever I felt this anxiety I tried to remind myself that our path is not unusual outside of Utah. I remember reading Michelle Obama’s book, Becoming, and telling Alison that the Obamas were in their 30s when they started having kids. Or watching the show "This Is Us" and seeing some of the characters become parents in their mid to late 30s. I looked for these examples in the media to remind myself that our path isn’t crazy. It may be different than most of the people we know, but it is our path. 

Our kids will be much younger than many of their cousins. Hopefully, they will have a cousin or two around their age. I feel a little bad that Skylee didn’t have cousins her own age on the Nielson side of her family. That is mostly our fault. I  thought maybe our kids would be closer to Anna’s age, but the thing about kids is they grow up faster than you think. 

I hope that waiting to become parents will have a few benefits. I like to think we have a little more wisdom and understanding than when we were in our 20s. Above all, our primary focus is ensuring our child feels unconditionally loved and grows up to be kind, compassionate, and comfortable in their own skin. We hope to instill in them a sense of curiosity, encouraging them to explore, take risks, and appreciate life's simple pleasures.

I don’t know what it feels like to be a parent, yet. I do know that I already love this unborn child and I cannot wait to meet them.