These are the reasons.

My daughter is ten and has spent most of her life watching superhero movies where the girls stood in the back. In June, we went to see Wonder Woman together. I didn't know how much it would mean to both of us.

My father lives in Hanoi. For twenty years, I've begged him to visit me in California. He always said he was too old, the flight was too long, America was too big. This June, at seventy-six, he finally came.

I never learned to swim as a kid. I was embarrassed about it for years, so I made excuses at pool parties and stayed in the shallow end at the beach.

My father is sixty-eight and has never run a step in his life, except, he says, "once, from a bee." In January, he decided he wanted to run a 5K. He asked me to train with him.

My daughter is eleven. In April, she announced she was starting a business. The business was slime.

My son joined Cub Scouts this year, which meant that in April, we had to build a pinewood derby car. You get a block of wood, four plastic wheels and four nails. Everything else is up to you.

My grandfather is eighty and has had a driver's license for sixty-four years without a single accident. He drives exactly the speed limit. Always. So I was shocked when he suggested we go to the go-kart track for my sixteenth birthday.

I'm from Ohio and know exactly nothing about cricket. Last year, my company hired a team of engineers from Bangalore, and in March, they invited the rest of the office to play in a parking lot after work.

I walked past a little music shop every day for six years on my way to the train. In the window, there was a mountain dulcimer, a long, narrow wooden instrument with a heart-shaped hole, that never seemed to sell.

I'm afraid of heights. I've always been afraid of heights. So when my teenage son asked me to go to the new indoor rock climbing gym with him in February, I agreed, mainly because he never asks me to do anything anymore.

My son's elementary school celebrated Lunar New Year this February with a lion dance, performed by a group from the local Chinese community center. I'm Chinese American, and my son has always been a little shy about it. He's one of three Asian kids in his grade.

I have given my wife fifty-two Valentine's cards. The first one I bought at a drugstore with money from my paper route. It had a cartoon bear on it and I spelled her name wrong.

I grew up in Tehran and moved to Colorado for graduate school. In February, my labmates convinced me to try skiing. "It's easy," they said. They were lying.

When I was a little girl, my father built me a dollhouse with three floors, a staircase and real wallpaper. When I grew up, my mother wrapped it in blankets and kept it in her closet for thirty years.

In January, my friend talked me into a "learn to curl" night at the local curling club. I'd only ever seen curling on TV during the Winter Olympics and thought it looked like shuffleboard on ice.

On Christmas Eve, my neighbors and I went caroling for the first time. It was my idea. I'd seen it in old movies and wanted to see if people still did it.

Between Christmas and New Year's, my partner and I took the train across Canada, from Toronto to Vancouver. Four days, four nights, nearly three thousand miles. We'd been talking about it for ten years.

My grandfather is Norwegian, and every December he makes lefse, a soft potato flatbread, for Christmas. This year, he decided I was finally old enough to learn. I'm thirty-one.