Our First Anniversary, or How the Hubby Makes Everything Right

Let's see, where were we? That's right, it was almost 8pm, vacuum exploded, hubby on crutches, and our first anniversary seemed to be going completely down the drain. As you can probably tell from this week's Friday's Letters, things turned around rather quickly. Tom told me to jump into the shower, once I got out I found Tom in our room with a dressed up in his black dress pants and burgundy dress shirt. He had a matching burgundy and black dress hanging on the door waiting for me. Once dressed up, we went out for dinner. By this point, it was almost nine, so we ended up at Texas Roadhouse, where we feasted on ribs and rib eye steaks. We mentioned it was our anniversary, and they spoiled us rotten, as always. Tom managed to finish his dinner, I had a second night of steak and ribs the next day. After dinner, we went across the street to Walmart to get a bottle of champagne. We were all dressed up, and Tom road around on one of those motorized shopping carts. Definitely not the classiest of wine establishments, but at about 10pm, it got the job done.

Once we got home, we pulled our cake out of it's freezer box. The cake topper fit right in. While I was setting up the cake, Tom pulled our champagne flutes, server set, and unity candle out of our curio cabinet. We toasted our first anniversary, and cautiously tried the year old cake. The buttercream frosting was fine, the cake a little dried out, and the lemon curd... well it tasted okay, but definitely a different texture. All in all, I ate my slice for the sake of tradition, but I do not think I would go about saving cakes for a year again in the future. At the same time, I now have TONS of extra space in my freezer.

Before we cut into the cake, Tom reminded me of something I saw on Pinterest that I wanted to do (he's totally a keeper). Someone posted the idea on Pinterest of taking a picture each year on your anniversary holding last year's anniversary picture. I had almost forgotten, but as we were taking pictures of the cake and everything, Tom asked me to get one of our wedding pictures. I'm so happy he reminded me, because that is definitely a tradition I want to continue in the future.

So the lesson learned from this whole experience? As cheesy as it sounds, life really is a roller coaster. There will be ups and there will be downs. In marriage, the best way to weather the downs is to rely on each other. Our first anniversary was far from perfect, but we still got to do all of the little traditions. We also got to spend the entire day together, which originally was not in the plan.

In other news, we went to see the bone specialist on Friday. Tom and I were both expecting the worst: surgery with weeks of recovery. As it turns out, while the screw in Tom's ankle has definitely moved, it looks like it has moved slowly over time. In other words, the bone and the joint look perfectly healthy and the pain Tom is experiencing is likely related to inflamed muscles and ligaments. The doctor prescribed Tom a month of physical therapy, and we both breathed a huge sigh of relief.