Five Years

Last Friday (the third) we celebrated five years of marriage. It was a very fun and special day. While I didn't get many photos, I wanted to write about it so I don't forget.

I woke up at around 7:00 to a quiet house. I had asked Shannon to wake me at 6:00, and he obviously didn't. He was gone and his breakfast preparations were still sitting on the counter, and I wondered where he had gone, thinking possibly he'd decided to go for a run. About 15 minutes later he showed up with chocolate croissants, a venti frappucino from Starbucks, and a travel mug for me (identical to the one I'd gotten him for Father's Day). Lane and I had croissants, Shannon and I shared the frappucino, and we got started with our day.

I checked my phone for messages and realized I'd gotten one the previous night saying that my friend Diana's water had broken and that they were going to the hospital. After a few texts and a phone call, we learned that she had given birth to their newest edition at around 6:45 that morning. So we all got showered and cleaned up, let Noel nap, and packed a snack bag for them. We headed to Burger King to pick up food for them (neither of them had eaten since dinner the night before) and went by the hospital for a visit. It was so fun to see them...we missed the first days of their first daughter's birth because we were here (visiting...not living here yet), so it was so special for us to be the first ones to see them, and to bless them with snacks for the day. Then we headed home, ate lunch, got the girls in bed, and I headed off to class.

After class I came home to a still-sleeping Lane. We woke her (I mean, it was almost 5:00 pm!) and started on prep for the babysitter: notes, meals, picking up, laying out jammies and diapers and such. Our babysitter showed up at 5:30 and we were out the door by 5:45 to enjoy dinner and a movie for the first time since having children.

Biber. Almost empty since it was before sunrise and we're still in the month of Ramadan.

We walked to a cute little restaurant called Biber (which means "pepper" [as in the bell kind]) that we actually went to for our third anniversary right after we'd arrived in Istanbul. We enjoyed dinner without having to chop up anyone else's food, tell them to sit on their bottoms, share our drinks or food, and so on. Then we caught a bus and headed to a mall where we got another frappucino (Shannon is ADDICTED to those things) for desert and then watched the newest Batman movie. We watched the credits all the way to the end because Shannon thought maybe there was a sneak peak trailer at the end, and didn't like my reasoning that if there had been one, surely we would have heard about it on Facebook. Needless to say, there was no sneak peak.

Dinner! Steak with a mushroom sauce and rice, and a beef curry. We each ate half and then swapped plates.

Anyhow, we took a taxi home, Shannon walked our babysitter home, and we were in bed by midnight. It wasn't a super special anniversary, but it was fun, and it was nice to celebrate. As Shannon said, we might not do anything really fancy for our anniversaries, but we always do something. We don't let the occasion pass without celebrating. What about you? Do you do "big and fancy" for things like anniversaries, or do they almost pass by unnoticed? Wondering where we fall of the scale of celebrators...