Five of the Eades kids and their parents, Susan and Jim Eades. The five kids there are: Mark, Cindy, Annette, Mike and Matt. Not shown: Kim.
One of the things about getting older, is you attend a lot more anniversary celebrations.
One of the rare things in this era are the wedding anniversaries, particularly ones that are 30 years or more.
Well in my case, my parents recently celebrated one of the rarest ones, their Diamond Anniversary, also known as a 60th wedding anniversary.
At my parents’ request, we kept this one small. We held it at my sister’s house and she was a gracious host.
One of the reasons we kept it small is that they don’t like big things any more; Mom walks a lot slower, and Dad has a hard time hearing things in big, noisy restaurants.
Now their 50th wedding anniversary was a big affair. We did it as a banquet, and “roasted” my parents thoroughly. But if you know our family, you know there aren’t too many things we won’t tease each other mercilessly about.
We teased them about the number of kids they begat (six) and about how they invented new math (Date of birth of first born minus date of marriage equals a lot less than nine months) and why we moved to California (It was to find a house with more than one bathroom).
At that event, my mother’s sister and others came out from Indiana to attend, as did many of the friends we’ve all known for decades in California.
But was that event better than this one?
No, both were fun and nice, just different.
We still swapped stories about things like past vacations, some fun things we did as a family (the vacations) and more. Just one of those chances for a larger family to get together and see each other, something that’s getting harder and harder to do as we all get older.
Congratulations Mom and Dad on making it through 60 years together.