This year had to be better than the last. While we grew as a couple and as individuals last year, we were really hoping to be able to see straight again and take a small step towards normalcy (or at least off the emotional rollercoaster). We absolutely acknowledge that our pain is nothing compared to those whom we love who lost so much, but nonetheless entering our third year of marriage we were hoping to find some peace.
Thus, we forged ahead. Sloane’s consulting took off, she had always had side projects but stepping away from agency life and into her own consulting gave her the opportunity to grow as a business person while extending her independence to continue to spend time upstate and not have to be in New York City 100% of the time. Taylor’s career also surged forward. His focus shifted from leading a venture fund to supporting entrepreneurs in his own consulting practice focused on finance for startups.
We started 2015 by spending all of January in Vermont. Crazy but we had someone request our apartment for the month via AirBnB (which we’ve used to great success) and decided to say yes. So we swapped the East Village for a little cabin we found outside Manchester, Vermont on a frozen stream and both continued to work remotely but added in daily hikes in the snowy woods, half-days skiing at Bromley and Mt. Snow and lots of cooking and baking in a kitchen much bigger than our own.
We traveled to Australia where Taylor spoke at the Do Lectures and we added in a few days in Melbourne and Sydney. We left feeling like we found a spot for our next sabbatical. Hey, always planning ahead! We went to New Orleans for Jazz Fest and to see friends and also built in weekend trips around NYC camping and exploring.
By far the biggest change of our lives came with the news that we were expecting a baby! Baby Davidson is due December 2015 so next year’s update will surely be filled with lots of baby updates. Finding out about the baby also helped us make a decision we had been thinking about for awhile - leaving New York. We love the city but craved more outdoor space and the opportunity to be closer to family while still building out our careers. Once the wheels were in motion it happened quickly. We bought a house in the Highland Park neighborhood of Pittsburgh and actually closed on the house on our anniversary. So that’s as far as this story - and this year - takes us.
Suffice to say, the best is yet to come!
Love,
]]>This year started with a more low-key celebration than the previous years. We were in upstate New York, celebrating the end of summer but still reeling from the tremendously emotional toll this past year took on us and on those closest to us.
This is the year we said sudden, tragic and heartbreaking goodbyes to Taylor’s best friend Jeremy, Sloane’s dear friend Nathan plus Sloane’s beloved family home at Hidden Valley. It felt like every few months we were experiencing a new tragedy and holding onto each other more than ever. They say that hardship tests a marriage and we expected that in our lifetime together we would see sorrow and pain but it came sooner than we expected and really knocked the wind out of our sails.
Our friends and family (you reading this) really supported us and we are so grateful for your love and kindness through what was a tough year for everyone. Another shining light throughout the year was that immediately following Halloween weekend we adopted our sweet Piper Dauphine Davidson from a rescue shelter in NYC. Sloane (in particular) has been wanting a dog so badly that she almost created a whole business around dog adoption! Finding Piper has been nothing short of a miracle. She is a bundle of joy but also quickly stepped into the role of therapy dog and for that we know we are very lucky to have her.
Sloane spent a month in the Congo working on a project, Taylor continued to grow both his role as a VC and his financial models available online for download. Plus, we moved! Even it was just from 4N to 4K within our same building. Very New York of us! It’s a bigger one bedroom, a corner unit and we are happy for the extra space.
And maybe the biggest upswing of the year was that we spent as much time as possible in upstate New York helping out at Hill Hollow Farm. Sloane, having never gardened or farmed a day in her life, really took to farm life and we feel blessed and lucky to have had the space and flexibility in our schedules to have extended time outside of the city helping friends. It leads us back to where we are right now, sitting in Eagle Bridge, NY staring out at the trees while eating a home-cooked meal from mostly home-grown food watching Piper roll around in the grass and listening to the sounds of nature.
It wasn’t easy to get to this day, but we’re grateful to be here.
Love,
]]>Our wedding website started as just that, a website for our wedding. Originally this was a Tumblr set up to pull in photos tagged with #stwedding and house information about our wedding weekend. However, as our first year of marriage progressed we realized we wanted to turn sloaneandtaylor.com into something more. It has always been our intention to curate memories and so in honor of our one year wedding anniversary on August 18th, we revamped and relaunched this site.
We had talked about using the site to capture the day to day of our lives, but the more we thought about it, we wanted it to appear as an exhibition. Many of our favorite moments over the past year have been opportunities to spend quality time with those we love. Many other favorite moments have been spent together, celebrating our first year of marriage as newlyweds and treating every spontaneous date night, every weekend getaway and every vacation as a “honeymoon.”
This project gave us time to reflect and appreciate each other. We talked about what it would be while hiking in the Catskills, during Vermont road trips, and on lazy Long Island beach days. We brainstormed versions of what it could look like, what we wanted to include and where it would live. Having projects and creating something to share publicly is a big part of what brought us together in the first place! Thinking back to our NOLAlicious days in New Orleans has provided us with an invaluable reminder of how important creative outlets are to us. When it came time to build this site out, we treated it like our own hackathon and sketched out the new site and executed it in a few days.
Looking back has been a tremendous exercise, but looking forward fills us with an incredible surge of energy and excitement. Life as a daring adventure or nothing has proven to be quite the adventure indeed!
Thanks for coming along on the ride.
With love and gratitude,
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