This week we celebrate the silver anniversary of an event that almost didn’t happen because I’m a flake, and back then I was worse.

The summer I graduated from college, Mike drove me home and we started talking about our shared, bucolic vision of owning horses and rearing children who would wear gingham and have double names we could holler from the front porch like proper folk. Mike thought naming a kid Cletus would be hilarious, so we agreed to give at least one kid a single name just to make fun of.

That was all before we realized both horses and children make an awful lot of poop, and also that picking out a baby name based on how much it made us giggle would be kind of cruel.