Yeah....I'm way behind. We celebrated our fifth anniversary in August, and I'm just now writing about it. The reason I'm so behind is that we've been a little busy going on dates! Life has been crazy recently with a crawling baby, a dissertation to edit, and a new project for Nathan at work, but we managed to re-institute our creative dating this past month. We look forward to sharing them with you over the next few weeks.
The fifth anniversary is the wood anniversary, or the silverware anniversary according to modern gift charts. We've always tried to be as creative as possible with our gifts, and this year was no exception. Nathan had a brilliant idea - he couldn't take me to the woods, so he thought he would help me look like the woods (i.e. camo pajamas). He ended up not being able to find what he wanted, so he scrapped that idea. I thought it was hilarious, though, so I made sure that at least one person in the family was in camo for our big day.
We went for breakfast at a restaurant that I'd been wanting to go to for some time - Bread Winners in Plano. The idea was to get eggs benedict, just like we'd enjoyed on our trip to New Zealand. We got the southwestern eggs benedict, which we unfortunately regretted later. The hollandaise sauce had Tobasco in it, which neither of us cared for. We're still on the search for a good eggs benedict in this hemisphere. The best part of the meal was the Mexican hot chocolate...yum!
We ran various errands after breakfast (after all, it was a Saturday morning), and then stopped by a cupcake place on the way home. Once we got Rebekah down for her nap, the gift giving began! Nathan went first. He set up the massage table in the living room and gave me an hour long massage...the first since I got pregnant over a year ago. Once I was good and relaxed, he walked me to the master bathroom where he had prepared a warm bubble bath. The even bigger surprise was what was sitting on the window sill above the bathtub...
He got me a candle holder made out of a wine barrel! I was so excited. You see, I had told him how much I wanted to get a candle piece for that windowsill to give our bathroom more of a "spa" feel. But, it's not a necessity - it's really not a necessity. I had decided that I would treat myself to one as a reward when I reached one of my post-pregnancy weight loss goals, but when that time came, I decided to give that money to something a bit more important. Nathan remembered and even took the trouble to look up one of my favorite stores in Napa Valley to find the one made out of a wine barrel (another thing I've always eyed). It was so, so thoughtful, and I couldn't have been more surprised.
I got to enjoy my new candles while taking a bubble bath and eating cupcakes. It was divine!
My gift to him wasn't exactly fancy, but it did get a big smile out of him. We are both huge fans of Everybody Loves Raymond, and one of our favorite episodes is called "Baggage". In that episode, Raymond and his wife have a lengthy standoff over who should put away the luggage from their recent vacation. In an attempt to get his wife to finally take care of it, Raymond sticks some stinky cheese in the luggage before leaving for a business trip. The cheese stinks up the whole house, and his wife is incensed when she figures out what he did.
At this point, Raymond's mother steps in. She tells Raymond's wife about how she received a giant fork and spoon for her wedding (the kind that go on the wall), and she and her husband had a similar standoff over who should take them back to the store and return them. She came home one afternoon, and rather than taking the big wooden fork and spoon back to the store, her husband had nailed them to the wall. Forty years later, they were still there. The episode concluded with one of the best pieces of marital advice that we'd ever heard..."Don't let a suitcase filled with cheese be your big fork and spoon."
In honor of that advice, I decided to combine the traditional gift of wood with the modern gift of silverware...no, not by getting Nathan a giant fork and spoon. Instead, I got him this...
I bought a cheeseboard and custom wood burned the quote into it! Now, whenever we have gatherings and bust this out, we have an instant conversation piece and a reminder than standoffs never do a marriage any good. :)
We concluded our celebrations by making our anniversary dinner together. We typically would go out to dinner, but that didn't work as well this year with Rebekah. We made a delicious meal of steak strips, bacon-infused risotto, marinated vegetable salad, and strawberry shortcake for dessert.
All in all, this anniversary was wonderful - looking forward to the next one!
