three.

three years is supposedly the leather anniversary. unless its the crystal/glass anniversary. depends on whether you are traditional or modern.

 

one bears testament to the strength of a marriage that lasts until year three, since leather is strong, long-lasting, and gets better with age.

 

the other is fragile and easily broken.

 

so i think i'll stick with leather. 

happy third anniversary to us!

an idiot's guide to theater etiquette.

1. dress the part. if there's ever a good excuse to dress up fancy, its for a trip to the theater. your brand new super flattering dress? wear it. that fancy bridesmaid's dress you never thought you'd ever wear again? wear it. those ties your grandma keeps buying for you? now's your chance to actually wear one. but your soccer warm ups? um, no. your favorite flourescent yellow hoodie? leave it at home.

i'm the one in the flattering new dress taking this unflattering picture. mark is the one not wearing a tie because i'm slowly learning to pick my battles.

2. arrive early. keep in mind, once you get to the theater you'll want time to grab a drink, peruse the merchandise, and use the restroom before finding your seat, so plan to have enough time for that. always a good rule of thumb: if you're on time, you're late.

3. put your camera away. and your stinkin' smart phone too. photography is usually not permitted inside the theater. i know its super tempting because its super exciting and the opening curtain just looks! so! cool! but. the ushers will yell at you. and that is embarrasing. save yourself the embarrasment and take pictures everywhere except in the theater.

like in the lobby, when you're extra early and need to kill some time. ps he's smoking a giant imaginary pipe like a snobby theater-goer. obvsly.

4. find your seats in a timely fashion. if you are tracking with the rules so far, this should be no problem. the problems arise when you arrive late, because once the lights go down it is not only much more difficult to read the letters and numbers on the seats, but also much more likely that your stumbling around in the dark will annoy your fellow theater-goers.

a very abbreviated guide to theater seating:

- rows are labeled alphabetically in ascending order.   

- seats are numbered from left to right facing the stage.

- when in doubt, ask an usher for help.

and for the love of Oz, please enter your row from the correct end so as to minimize the number of people you have to make stand up as you shuffle past. this is not only a pain to those in your row, but also those in the rows behind you who paid to see a show, not the butts of the people in front of them.

THIS is what i came to see

source

5. remain seated. yes, the whole time. see above re: shuffling in and out of rows. this is not only disrespectful to those seated around you, but also to the actors on stage. your drink refill is not that important, and it can wait. but if you think otherwise, and you have already arrived late and then left again in the middle of the act, dont be surprised if the ushers refuse to let you back into your row and make you stand. enough is enough.

6. come back after intermission. you guys! intermission wasn't the end! you missed the whole second half of the show! how sad for you...

source

7. ENJOY!!! going to the theater is fun! seeing Wicked at the theater for your anniversary is extra-fun! dont be embarrased to lip-sync to all the songs, because chances are at least half of the audience is doing the same thing. i mean, they totally were, right? i wasnt the only one, right?!? eh, i dont even care if i was. it was AH-MAZING!

two.

can you believe its been two whole years since i married this hunk?  

i hardly can. when i try to think about it, my brain usually follows one of two trains of thought: either 1) wow, two whole years! thats forever! can you even remember not being married?! or 2) well, we're still learning and trying to figure this all out. after all, we've only been married for two years. its like time has done that weird scrunching thing it does sometimes when an event can somehow seem forever ago but not that long ago all at the same time. does that make any sense at all?

i guess its like this: when i look back over the last two years, i am kind of amazed and impressed at where we were then, and how we have changed as we have navigated through adventures and projects and decisions and plans. but even so, there are some changes that i still have a little bit of trouble with. the most embarrasing? i am still not used to signing my new last name. am i even allowed to call it my "new" last name at this point?

i had my old signature down to a science. it was the perfect blend of speed, aesthetics, and illegibility. i spent years perfecting that capital H followed by the non-descript scribble that upon closer inspection  miraculously incorporated all the right bumps to represent all the right letters.

but getting married changed all that. my "new" last name broke up the smooth flow of my signature, forcing me to slow down and think hard about the mechanics of forming these foreign, tall letters, leaving me frustrated with the elementary, non-cohesive look of the final product. and when i didnt take that time to slow down, that pesky new last name got even worse: it wound up looking less like the last name of my husband, which i willingly and lovingly assumed as my own, and more like a four-letter expletive. awesome.

i've gotten used to a number of things in the past two years of being married (living with a boy, fighting fair, cooking for two, etc) so why can i not get a handle on something as simple, not to mention important, as my own last name?

happy SECOND anniversary, Mark. i love you and i love sharing your last name (and maybe eventually i'll get used to signing it as my own) (hows that for romance?)

conveyances.

i got to Skype with my parents last night. they live really far away, so we dont get to see nearly enough of each other. we chatted about our upcoming family vacation, i toured them around my house, and they not-so-subtly reminded me that today is their anniversary, by way of a mention of french-kissing that made my 14-yr old inner self be all BLECH while my sentimental side was all AWWW HOW SWEET.

my parents have been happily married for 32 years. (that's over 3 decades more than Mark and me, and some days i feel like the two of us have been married for-ev-er.) they are still very much in love, and i feel immensely blessed to be their daughter, and to have them in my life as a wonderful example of a loving, Godly marriage.

dancing at our wedding, October 2010

i turned to the Google to check up on the traditional anniversary gift, just to see if 'phone call' would finally be recognized as an acceptable gift, but i came up with nothing. i guess (traditionally) when you've been married as long as these two, you're no longer really expected to remember your anniversary every. single. year, just every 5 or so.

BUT the modern anniversary gift for your 32nd year is listed as 'Conveyances.' i'm not 100% sure what this means, but i think its supposed to be something like a car. or a fire truck. maybe a bike or a scooter would suffice.  perhaps for the exceptionally cash-strapped, a walk would be a good substitute. most likely a combination is expected, since conveyances is obviously plural. but i'm pretty sure what it does NOT mean is a couples' dentist appointment, which is what my parents have planned for their day. talk about romantic!

happy anniversary you two crazy kids... and may your conveyance to your dentist appointments be extra special today!

our low-key valentines day.

im pretty certain that i have mentioned here before that i have not always been a huge valentine's day fan. as in i have been known to wear all black and be an outspoken advocate for singles-awareness-day. but for some reason, my attitude has been shifting over the past few years. it may or may not have something to do with having the kind of friends that helped me to understand that Valentine's day is about celebrating ALL the love in our lives, even if its not of the romantic variety. oh, and finding the love of my life, too. that was pretty cool.

so i kind of went a little overboard this year. well, overboard for ME that is, which means that our celebration would probably be considered low-key by anyone who considers the kind of romantic overkill found only in rom-coms to be normal or the standard by which all romantic gestures must be measured. but for us, it was pretty close to perfect.

we exchanged our gifts over the weekend. we didn't really plan to, but it just kind of happened. you see, i went a little crazy and decided that in addition to the meaningful little crafty things i was working on that i really loved and i knew would look really cute hung on the walls of our front room, i needed to also get the hubs something that he would actually really like. so i bought him a miter saw. i was really sneaky about buying it and i was going to make him wait until tuesday... aand then i just gave it to him. i didn't wrap it. i didnt sneak it into the house and set it up for him. i didnt send him on an elaborate scavenger hunt. i didnt even put a bow on it. it was just like "hey, i have this thing in the trunk of my car that you said you wanted and i cant come up with any sort of believable lie to keep you from buying one for yourself in the next 3 days. its really heavy so you're going to have to heft it into the house yourself. happy valentines day."

he does really like it. and he proved that by immediately building me this giant awesome bench.

and then he even put a coat of stain on it over the weekend. isn't it fantastic?!? it still needs another coat of stain and a few coats of polyurethane, and a cushion for the top, and some baskets for underneath, but i'm really excited about it and i cant wait until it can move upstairs for good.

so with all the big gift-giving all out of the way we were all set up for a relaxing tuesday evening. we made an uber-romantic grilled chicken salad for dinner, which was made uber-romantic by working on it together while chatting about our days at work and not getting in a fight over having to share our teeny-tiny kitchen.

i gave mark one of the two crafty gifts i had been working on, the one that was mostly finished. the only thing missing is the dry erase marker so we would actually be able to write our love notes. (this morning i just yelled down the hall, 'because you take out the trash! that's why i love you today!' so at least its not a complete waste without the marker) i'm still waiting on my free map of Maine to come in the mail so that i can finish my other project, but i'll be sure to share it when i get it done.

and do you see that rose? that right there is the first flower that mark has ever bought me that has not come wrapped in dirt. its simple and perfect and i hope i can keep it alive for at least a few days.

we spent the rest of our evening snuggled on the couch for a rom-com double feature of Friends with Benefits and Crazy Stupid Love, courtesy of our local redbox because we dont actually own any good rom-coms.

it was a perfectly low-key-but-still-super-special valentine's day, and a great way to celebrate our three-year dating anniversary. (a day early) hope you all had a wonderful day, too!

One, Part Two.

and/or How To Freeze Your Cake and Eat It Too. 

so i told you all yesterday about our super-special low-key anniversary plans. dinner at home, watch our wedding video, open our wedding jar, and eat the top tier of our cake. out of all these pretty standard anniversary events, one of the most anticipated was definately the cake. did it survive an entire year in the creepy downstairs freezer? would it be edible, or moldy, or frozen solid like a big cakey icecube? what did it taste like in the first place? (turns out neither of us ate any of the cake when it was fresh) did we ever actually take it out of the box and wrap it up? which one of us did that anyway?

only one way to find out. 

 we trekked downstairs to the far corner of the basement where the creepy old refridgerator resides. we opened the freezer door, and lo and behold - there was something wrapped in aluminum foil. a good sign.

we figured that whatever was in that package would thaw better if it were unwrapped, so thats what we did. after removing three pieces of clear packing tape (yeah i don't know why either) and the first layer of aluminum foil, we found ANOTHER layer of aluminum foil covering what we were assuming to be the top tier of our cake.

peeling back the second layer revealed a layer of plastic wrap...

...followed by a layer of wax paper. apparently whoever wrapped this thing up meant serious business.

and it turns out that inside all that wrapping was indeed the top tier of our wedding cake, just like we remembered it. and take a look at how good this thing looks after an entire year in that getup!

I transferred the cake from its plethora of protective layers onto a plate for mostly aesthetic purposes, and let it sit for a bit.

while we waited for dinner to finish, and the cake to thaw, we listened to our wedding music and opened our first wedding jar.

inside the jar was a plethora of good advice, a copy of the BFOTB's speech, a few reminders about the outcome of the football game that day, and not one but TWO warnings about the cake. specifically, not to even bother with it.

well that only made us more curious to see how ours survived its year in the freezer, so after dinner we decided to chance it and cut ourselves a piece. (and i would just like to say that i was pleasantly surprised to find that my cake-cutting skillz have greatly improved over the past year)

time for the moment of truth...

the verdict: it tasted like cake. not particularly good cake, but the kind of cake you would expect to get from a grocery store bakery. which incidentally is exactly where our cake was from. we each ate a whole piece, and since we're not puking our guts out today, i would have to call this adventure in cake-freezing a great success!

 additionally, i would like to take this opportunity to apologize to everyone who did eat cake at our wedding and then spent the rest of the evening with green teeth. my bad.

our only dilemma now that the cake turned out to be edible and reasonably tasty is that we're having a hard time justifying just throwing it out, which is what we were planning on doing. so you tell us: what should we do with the rest of our cake? feed it to my coworkers? have a second wedding reception? wrap it up and leave it on a strangers front porch? the possibilities are almost endless...

One.

so this is what a first anniversary feels like...

its a little bit...

well...

is 'normal' too harsh a word for such a supposedly special day?

i feel a little bad because i don't have anything really deep or insightful to say here. 

maybe its because my mind has been focused on other things lately and i haven't taken time to really reflect on the past 12 months. i mean, we've done a lot. we've travelled to some different places. we've had a lot of fun. there has been laughter and movies and snuggles and fights and reconciliations and surprises and projects and celebrations. and i loved all those things. i honestly wouldn't change anything about our first year of marriage. but on some level, it was just another year. another span of 365 days, just like the last one, just with different memories.

maybe its because we didn't make any huge plans. it is a Monday after all. and i was out of town all weekend. we plan to make dinner together tonight. we plan to watch our wedding video for the first time. we plan to eat the top layer of our cake. we plan to open our first wedding jar. and then on Friday, we plan to dress up fancy and go out to dinner somewhere nice. somewhere new. there may or may not be presents. i had lofty ambitions for an awesomely crafty gift for the hubs that would be heartfelt and let him know just how much i love him. and then i ran out of time. so instead i picked up a neat little something while i was out this weekend. i didn't ask for anything. i didn't really even hint about anything a lot. and is it too corny to say that i might not even mind all that much not getting something because i'll be happy to just spend time together?

maybe its because i've always just built it up in my head to be more than it really is. i mean, yes, its a big deal. its our first real anniversary after all. but i have celebrated a lot of anniversaries prior to this one. every month that we dated, every month that we were engaged, and every month that we've been married up to this point have all been major milestones for me and for us, and i celebrated accordingly, even if only in my head. so maybe i thought that when they all were added up into one big, full year that somehow it would feel bigger? but really it just feels like every other milestone.

but i know that its not. i know that this day is the one that matters. i know that February 15th, and March 20th don't even hold a candle to October 3rd. i guess there's just something about promising to love another person for "always and forever, no doubt whatsoever" and really meaning it that makes a day extra special. and i wouldn't have it any other way.

Happy FIRST Anniversary Mark! One down, hopefully at least 49 to go...