I’ve been so focused on the smaller details these past few weeks: diapers, naps, drool (only some of it mine). As a result, I’ve barely taken note of the fact that we’ve reached a few milestones here:

Today is the one-year anniversary of Getty Images’ acquisition of Pump Audio. Seems impossible that was an entire year ago. I’m incredibly proud of what we built: a business that plugs thousands of independent artists into a global marketplace of production professionals in television, advertising and film—people who want to use their music and pay them for it.

Surprisingly, our deal with Getty Images went through, despite the fact that I had a wardrobe malfunction at a critical juncture. During our final meeting with Getty’s CEO and assorted top brass, I inadvertently exposed my bellybutton to the room for a good quarter of an hour before realizing it. In my post-red-eye flight/whirlwind preparation haze, I’d missed a button on my dress shirt, so that when I leaned back in my chair while I was talking, my shirt puckered wide open just above the belt. So I suppose it’s the one-year anniversary of my presenting my navel in the Getty conference room, too.

I’m also now voluntarily unemployed. That’s my former desk above, in the Pump church. I still need to clear it out, actually. We’ve been in England for what seems like forever now, so my last day as a Pump/Getty Images employee—technically two weeks ago—was incredibly anti-climactic. It was kind of like going on a long trip and getting quietly divorced from a seven-plus-year marriage over email.

But this was a happy, friendly divorce, mind you. I still love everyone there at Pump—I just needed to take some time with Evie and Emma and figure out what I want to do next.

Which brings me to the next big milestone: Emma’s and my second wedding anniversary.

We spent our first anniversary down in Cape May, where we got married on June 2nd, 2006. Emma was pregnant for the third time that year, both of the first two pregnancies having ended in miscarriage. Here was our third chance, though with her cramping badly (as was the case just before the first two miscarriages) we assumed the worst.

Luckily, every once in a while self-diagnosis on Google actually deflates panic rather than stoking it. I quickly googled “cramping and pregnancy” on my Blackberry, and found that cramping can often be a good sign, meaning that the body is stretching the uterus in preparation for a growing fetus. We agreed to a moratorium on further googling, and clung to this potentially positive factoid during our 5-hour drive home. We listened to music and talk radio, held hands a bit, and in general didn’t say much.

Our 2008 trip down to Cape May was different in two major ways. The first was that we brought along 4-month old Evie. Everything was okay, just as Google promised. She is a very sweet and fun little baby, although not yet much of a beachgoer. In light of the latter fact, the second major difference in this trip was that I never got to go to the beach. Not once. We spent an entire week on a beach holiday, renting a house a six-minute walk from the ocean, and I barely touched the sand.

The one exception to this was when Emma and I brought Evie out to the spot on the Cape May Point where we said our vows two years ago.

There’s been some considerable erosion at the beach, exposing some large rocks that weren’t there on our wedding day. I don’t believe in omens even slightly, and don’t mean this as a metaphor or anything, so I’m just making a completely unscientific meteorological/geological observation here. It’s super windy (technical term) at Cape May Point, so one might assume that with each passing year that beach is going to be progressively carried elsewhere on the breeze.

All I know is, I hope to see a day, years and years hence, when Emma and I drag a teenage Evie down to the point, stand on the bare rocks where the beach used to be, and gush over our long-ago nuptials while she rolls her eyes at us.

Emma and I went down to the city on Saturday to see our friends Slobodan and Liz get married.

There was a beautiful reception dinner with something like 8 courses of Chinese food, including everything from jellyfish to sesame noodles to lobster. But the highlight of the reception by far was the lion dance, wherein two dragon-like male and female “lions” wooed each other with leaps and spins to the rhythm of traditional drums and cymbals.

The lion dance is performed to bring good luck to the new couple and bless their home, and to ward off evil spirits.

My camera battery crapped out before the end of the dance, which featured Slob and Liz “feeding” a silvery wrapped object to the lions from the long end of a stick.

Best of luck and double happiness to the new couple!

Emma and I spent this past weekend down in Cape May, reliving some of the memories from last June. I’m stunned that a year has passed already.

Apart from missing a torrential downpour by about sixteen seconds on our wedding day, we lucked out in the relative lack of beachgoers that afternoon. Here’s what the scene looked like at the same hour on June 2nd of this year:

The day after our wedding, my friend Patrick told me a story about another beach wedding he attended where an incredibly loud speed boat gunned a few tight donuts just offshore during the service, the roar of the engine drowning out parts of the ceremony. After several spins, the driver idled the boat and craned his neck, looking at the wedding. He cupped his hands over his mouth and yelled, “DON’T DO IT, BUDDY!!!” then gunned the engine a few more times, and sped off.

We didn’t have any speed boat driving hecklers, but we did have this one passerby, who was awesome:

Nobody yelled “don’t do it, buddy” (or “don’t do it, girlfriend” for that matter.)

In any case, I hadn’t actually cracked open the box of pictures from our wedding for nearly a year. I’d heard from so many people that your own wedding is always a blur, that you barely remember any of it. This was not the case for me at all. I remember so much of the day distinctly. Of course we missed out on talking to a few people as much as we would have liked, but we got to dance for hours, which was our favorite part of the reception. (And I remember lots of quieter moments, too.)

As for the dancing, I’ll forego posting the 73,000 dancefloor pics we have, but I should note an outrageous similarity between my father-in-law’s and my own dancefloor face. (I’m still working on the snapping, Malc. It’s not easy puckering up and keeping the beat with your fingers all at once.)

There are parts of the wedding I think about quite often, actually. I think about what Malcolm said to me when he reached the end of the aisle with Emma and pressed her hand into mine. I think about some of the things said during the service, and some of the things Emma and I said to each other while we had our only few moments of the day on our own, speeding off in the post-ceremony escape car.

And I think about standing with Emma outside the reception hall door, waiting for it to open for our entrance, hearing the muffled first notes of the music starting up, clutching her hand tightly as we stepped forward together, and saying to her, “Here we go….”