Family
I grew up as the second child of a family of five kids. My parents both completed bachelor’s degrees in international studies at BYU. My mom went on to complete law school and my dad did an MPA and went on to work in water finance and sustainability. They had their hands full raising five kids, with my mom being the main caretaker at home. Growing up, one of my memories involved frequently having conversations in the kitchen after school with my mom and my older sister that would last for hours. My dad traveled to many conferences, but when he was home would have all sorts of fun with the family. We took a lot of family roadtrips, too. Thanks to having two younger sisters and a DVD player in the car, I could quote from most Barbie movies by the time I was sixteen.
We moved around a lot growing up, usually due to changes in my dad’s job. He often worked in the finance department for cities, where people might retire in the same job after many decades. So, in order to move up, usually you had to look outwards to positions available in other cities. At other times, my parents let us know that they had prayed and felt inspired that we needed to move. Our move from California to Colorado was one of these as far as I remember. We caught the beginning of moving out of California as the housing market destabilized and began to crash. Colorado is where I attended some of middle school and most of high school; I consider it to be “where I grew up”, even if I had spent more years elsewhere. My parents were encouraging of some of the new hobbies that I started up in Colorado - breakdancing, parkour, and tricking.
left: Me striking a "side chair" breakdance "freeze" at Elitch Gardens in Colorado (mild background inpainting via https://cleanup.pictures). right: Me doing a "wall-run" on the side of my high school building.
When people ask how I got started into breakdancing, I describe how I had been on the tennis team and in advanced placement classes with several people that were also a part of the school’s hip hop club focused more on the breakdancing side of things.
I finished high school early and in the same year as my older sister. We both started at BYU around the same time and served missions during overlapping time frames, which was pretty cool for us. My family took a vacation to Provo during the summer that I started that has now turned into approximately twelve years of living in Utah. I often joked (albeit fairly seriously) that my parents followed us to college.
After serving a mission, I met V, now my wife, in the cafe of the science building at BYU, which is a fun story in itself. Over the last several years, we have shared fun, growth, challenges, excitement, and uncertainty together. Most recently, we have welcomed N, our spunky daughter (I wonder who she gets it from?) into the world. The fun, growth, challenges, excitement, and uncertainty have each deepened in their own rights. We took our first family vacation to California last year as part of a reward work trip for V, who works full-time as a design engineer. During the week, I’m the primary caretaker of N, and during the evenings and F/Sa we switch and I do the heavy-lifting on my PhD. It’s been both challenging and rewarding. Something we’ll often repeat is, “Go team Baird!” We agree and disagree, we uplift and argue, we stay healthy and we get sick. We work, we play, we cry, and we laugh. We’re a family and a team, working imperfectly towards being better spouses, better parents, better children, better people, and better followers of Jesus Christ. We love our family!