Tuesday, January 17, 2012

19th Anniversary Celebration

On Sunday, Rita and I completed 19 years of marriage. That's right: 19 years! It's hard to believe it was that long ago that we tied the knot. I must have been like 8 years old.

I was in charge of planning some sort of celebration. It was particularly challenging this year for a couple of reasons. First of all, we didn't want to spend much money. Yes, we are trying to be disciplined with our money, but more importantly this year is an off year. We will spend the big bucks for our 20th anniversary. The second difficulty is that we have both temporarily sworn off of junk food. (I will probably explain more about our new diet in a future post, but basically our whole family is trying to not eat junk food except on specific occasions during the first 100 days of 2012.) Going out to dinner or a treat has been a common date activity since we first met, but without eating junk food our options would be limited to basically a sandwich from Subway--not exactly the most romantic restaurant. I knew I'd have to use my imagination just a bit.

The fun started on Saturday. The first activity I planned was for the two of us to go to a discount movie. We went and saw Tower Heist at the Kaysville theater. Neither of us knew much about the movie, other than it got a decent score on Rotten Tomatoes. We were pleasantly surprised. It has some funny parts, and the plot is pretty good for a comedy. I wouldn't recommend it for young children, but it's definitely worth seeing.

On Sunday we exchanged gifts with each other. Rita got me a trunk-mounted bike rack for my car, which I will use a lot this summer. I got her a set of Conair Xtreme Instant Heat Hot Rollers. These are not exactly the most romantic gifts we've ever gotten each other, but I think we got all the romantic gifts we could think of back during anniversaries 1 through 10. I guess you could say that the romance has dwindled a bit, but did I really want some cologne?

On Monday, we decided to include the kids in our celebration. We all went to the Ogden Ice Sheet and participated in the Layton City Family Skate Night. The skating was only a dollar! We have varying skill levels at the sport. Rita is a good skater, coming from Canada and all. I am just good enough to make it fun. Todd is decent, and Kenna and Alec had never been. Everyone sure had fun.


After some early hesitations everyone was cruising around the rink pretty well.


It was a fun celebration for me. But, it wasn't as fun as what I was celebrating...19 wonderful years of being married to Rita!

2 comments:

Barb said...

So many favourite things that I don't know where to begin.
Is Alec wearing PJ's?
Love the Y toques and shirts.
Love that you went skating. Was this rink used for the Olympics it looks like the Olympic symbol in the background. Love the no junk food for 100 days, it is really hard to not have processed food we are so used to dinner in 30 minutes or less it takes a lot of hard work and planning and is exhausting. Jesse and I are on a Dave Ramsey kick so we are also watching the $$. We would love to be out of debt as fast as we can but it is going to take years.... But, better to be paying it off rather than adding it up. Loving the posts as always.

bdz132 said...

Barb: Yes, Alec is wearing his pajamas. Yes, there were a few Olympic events held there but I can't remember which ones. I am a fan of Dave Ramsey.