For most anniversaries Romance can choose from an array of opportunities—the world is its oyster. (For our first anniversary we went away for an entire romantic weekend.) But when placenta previa leads to bed rest and then house arrest, Romance has few options, especially this late in the pregnancy. In our case, just one…
Can you feel the love tonight?
That’s right, the basement during naptime. The photo tells the entire story.
The Room: yes, the home office, the place where I design, create, program, delegate, edit, email, backup. A little hard to get past the fact that 10 feet away is my mounting inbox, my billing (still not done), and the cables sticking out of my future backup strategy. Yes, I spent my anniversary with a multi-function printer, so what? (sigh)
The Cups: water and tea to go with the Chinese food I brought down to my home office where our three bouncing boys promised not to bother us. Some promises, it turns out, are hard for three-year-olds to keep. (“What could they possibly be doing down there? You stay here, I’ll go check it out.”)
The Cards: mine to her at the top. It’s the store-bought card. Had to buy that one in 30 seconds in between errands with Snazzy Hippo waiting for me to pick her up from shopping at the mall. Hers to me on the bottom right: handmade with love, personalized for me, must have taken her 3 hours or more. It is a work of art.
The Remote: OK, so if you’re in the home office, you might as well take full advantage of iTunes on the Mac across the room. Cue the romance in 3/4 time and skip to the next track if it doesn’t fit the mood. Makes you seem more prepared than you are. The only real strategy on my part was sorting by track duration so we got lots of variety at the beginning when we needed it most.
The Chronicle: lower middle. That is the top right corner of the 6th draft of our 12th Anniversary Chronicle. Spent some of our precious together time on that. It seems to never be finished. There is always a word or phrase to correct or tighten or completely re-think. Late again this year, probably not our best ever, but part of me is impressed that we might manage to get it out at all between Christmas and Easter.
The Candles: for a good long conversation, get to the end and blow them out together, symbolizing that the words you have just spoken are now wafting into nothing-but-the-memories-that-will-last-a-lifetime. (Dang, I should have thought of that when I was there; she might have liked that. Romance post-facto.)
The Napkin: your napkin doesn’t look like that unless the entire thing is over, which it was (as I took the photo) and is (as I write about it). And perhaps it wasn’t that bad. After 12 years we have learned to integrate many compartments of our lives into each other, we have grown to appreciate each other’s space, and we have loved each other through any circumstance.
So down goes another year of marriage into the memory books. Where shall we celebrate next year? (Surely not the treehouse?)
[If you have an anniversary story to share, write a comment to this post.]