Anniversaries

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I love Anniversaries!  Be they wedding anniversaries, birthdays, celebrating the first day you bought a car, I love taking time out of the mundane to celebrate special moments.  Our wedding anniversary is one of my favorite times of year.  We are really bad at having regular date nights (unless zoning out while watching The Good Wife counts, because we're really good at that!), so it's really important for us that we take time to just be together, distractionless, reliving our highs, talking through our lows, and recharging.  For our fifth anniversary last year we went to the Bahamas for a week.  Other years we've gone back to our favorite spots in Cambria and St. George.

This year we managed to swing a private viewing of the Aquarium of the Pacific with a romantic dinner for two from one of our favorite restaurants.  We had a babysitter, a romantic table, and a piano nearby with someone ready to serenade us as we ate and watched the sharks swim lazily by.  The table might have only been two feet high and the pianist a hyper three year old, but other than that we had the room to ourselves!  And the sharks might have been on a live-webcam, but we did have a front row seat.  Oh, and did I mention that this was all in the lobby of Miller Children's Hospital?  Ah, best laid plans.  With the raging flu season upon us, we ended up in the hospital this weekend with our youngest, D.  Thankfully, the virus was short-lived and we were discharged after two nights, but it made for a very long weekend.  And a very lame anniversary.

Or did it?  I mean, it's great when you get to spend your anniversary at a fancy restaurant.  It's great when your spouse lavishes you with flowers and diamonds.  But it's actually even greater when your husband goes out on a coffee run and returns with not only flowers, but a Get Well Soon balloon for your son as well, just because he wanted to make him smile.  A romantic hotel is amazing, but it's even more amazing to be told by your spouse that he will stay at the hospital for the second night in a row so that you can go home and get better sleep.  It's even better to be sitting together in the hospital, knowing that you are united through the good and bad.  Would I ever plan an anniversary like this?  Of course not!  It was scary and exhausting or stressful.  Does it make the amazing getaways less special or important?  Never! But the gold of your wedding bands is proved in the actual fire, not in the candlelight.  I know a lot of people do vow-renewals at certain points in their marriage.  And that's awesome.  But there's nothing like renewing your vows on your anniversary by your child's hospital bed, knowing that in sickness and in health, in good times and bad, in pure exhaustion and rested bliss, you are in it together.  




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