My parent’s celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary on March 14, which also happens to be “Pie Day”. Math nerds will recognize Pi as a number famous for going on forever. It literally has no end but the first five digits are “3.1415”. Hence, the date 3/14/15 is “Pi (or Pie) Day”.

My parents asked me to get them a “Pi Day” t-shirt for the occasion. If you do a Google image search for “pi day” you see lots of apple pies cut in the shape of a Pi symbol, that sort of thing. That seemed a little too on-the-nose for me. Besides, this wasn’t just Pi day. It was also their 45th anniversary, which is quite a milestone. So I wanted to do something special just for them.

I pondered for a while…how could I combine pi, pie, and a wedding anniversary into one design?

This is what I came up with. My dad loves lemon pie, and the classic pie-in-the-face gag seemed like a fun way to illustrate the ups and downs of marriage. My only regret is that I didn’t do a better job of capturing their likenesses. These cartoon people only bare a vague resemblance to my parents. Caricature was never my strong suit.

For the record, my mom and dad actually get along pretty well. Like any couple they have their disagreements but my mom is actually a pretty calm person and my dad is not the type of guy to deserve such treatment. But the image was fun to draw and, I hope, gets across the point that marriage is hard but it’s worth hanging in there for.