Today is my 50th birthday, and looking back on my 40s from this vantage point, they were *a lot*.
I became a dad (to twins). They’re now in 3rd grade. In their 8 years, we’ve taken them to Disneyworld and to Atlanta to visit family and friends. COVID resulted in the twins spending their kindergarten year on Zoom. Our son (who has special needs requiring speech and occupational therapy) handled the Zoom year surprisingly well. Our daughter had a very rough time with the Zoom year. She desperately needed to be around children her own age.
On the work front, I went from being gifted President’s Club seats to Nationals games and box seats to the infamous “You Like That!” game at FedEx Field by my employer, to laid off from that same company and out of work for four months (the longest I’ve ever been out of work in my entire career). Over 6 years later, I still work for the same company that hired me out of unemployment, have been promoted twice, and helped a handful of my direct reports get promoted as well (the most successful of them went to Amazon, and is now a senior manager at Microsoft).
My 40s included a good amount of domestic and foreign travel (though the pandemic stole a few years of it). We kicked off my 40s with a trip to Europe that included Barcelona, Nice, Monaco, Dolceacqua (for the bridge there Monet painted), and London. Another trip to Europe included Amsterdam and Paris. Domestic travel has taken my wife and I to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Scottsdale, New York, and Minneapolis. While the pandemic isn’t really over, I started taking an annual solo trip for brief break from parenting and other family responsibilities. Philadelphia and Boston were the destinations the past couple of years. And while a change in my work portfolio toward the end of last year has added a bit of work travel to my schedule, a trip entirely for me will get onto my itinerary for 2024 somehow.