There should be champagne involved

Today is our 8th Anniversary.

I don't know what on earth we were thinking getting married in January. I mean I know I originally was thinking I wanted a winter wedding, and I'm still glad I had one, but January 8th? This is not a great date and I'll tell you why.

First off, December is an expensive month - groceries, presents, cards, decorations, outfits for Christmas parties...The list of what you can spend your money on in December is limitless. PLUS, my birthday is in December. The first year I was with Hugh for the double whammy he gave me a pair of black gloves as my birthday gift. For his birthday the following June he got an x-box. A little unbalanced don't you think? To top it all off, the gloves he got me were really bad quality suede that left streaks of black dye across my face if my hand came in contact with my skin. Which I only realized when I got home after an evening spent outdoors talking to mostly strangers. Thank you very much.

Secondly, December is busy. By the time you finish celebrating Christmas - with family, friends, office parties, etc. you're exhausted. And then you have to do more celebrating on New Years Eve. Perhaps if we had gotten married just before Christmas or in between Christmas and New Years we would celebrate it more often but as it stands by the time the holiday season is over we are partied out, celebrated out, broke, and exhausted. And then our anniversary comes up before we even have time to turn around twice. As a result our anniversaries have always been very anti-climactic.

We didn't even really go on much of a honeymoon, just to Jasper for 3 days, because we had to move to Fort St. John a week after our wedding day. Jasper + January that year = so cold your nostrils stuck together when you inhaled outside, so we promised ourselves we'd go somewhere tropical on our first anniversary. Fast forward a year and where were we? Not on a cruise, not on a beach, not drinking drinks with paper umbrellas in them. We were hauling the heaviest shelving unit known to man up two awkward flights of stairs in our apartment building and we were fighting. I couldn't tell you now what the fight was about. All I remember is that once we finally got that blasted thing into our apartment the rest of the night was spent in huffy silence.

The following year we decided to "do something." But it was still not tropical. Instead we had the brilliant idea to go to the West Edmonton Mall. In January. In our car. It was actually a lot of fun but on the way home we wanted to visit some friends in Calgary and we spent the entire drive from Edmonton to Calgary in almost total silence with our knuckles white on whatever we were gripping. I have driven in a lot of snow but it was nothing compared to the absolute white-out conditions of that road.

Anniversary 3 I don't remember at all. I'm sure we went out for dinner or something but it was obviously pretty unremarkable. Anniversary 4 would have been equally unremarkable had I not gotten pregnant with our twins. That's not the sort of thing you forget.

Anniversary 5 our twins were 4 months old and we had only the window between feedings to go out. We decided to go see a movie. We went to see "The Incredibles". At 4:30pm. Talk about romance! I think we were so exhausted that the thought of sitting through dinner and trying to hold a coherent conversation was simply too much effort. Staring in silence at a screen of pretty moving colours was much more appealing.

Anniversary 6 came on the heels of the year from hell where we suffered two major losses in our family, resigned from pastoring at our church, pursued a career change and decided to move to Alberta all within a few short months. Surviving, not celebrating, was our priority that year.

Last year, Anniversary 7, we spent apart because Hugh had gone to Calgary for 8 weeks of school and I stayed in the Okanagan to bounce between our families and try to survive 8 weeks of single parenting. Hugh left on January 1st and to try to distract myself from feeling "poor me, poor me" I decided to reorganize my parents bookcase. It's a beautiful piece of furniture with great books and decorative items that just needed a little tlc. We rearranged the books according to size and colour and I moved the objets d'art around to give it more balance. I felt very satisfied with myself at the end and we had come across some great finds like some old books of mine from childhood and a wonderful book about the Yukon River and a book of Yukon poems by Robert Service. We even found a beautiful pair of pearl earrings right behind John Irving's book "A Prayer For Owen Meany". My mom and I both thought they were a gift for her from my stepdad that he had forgotten to give her at Christmas. There is usually always one gift in our family that gets forgotten about until turning up in some unlikely place.

Anyway, the day of our anniversary my parents gave me a card that Hugh had left behind for me. Can you believe the forethought? In the midst of packing up 2 months worth of stuff, plus getting everything bought, wrapped, and packed for Christmas, plus getting everything finalized for school, Hugh had thought of our anniversary and bought me a card. In advance. I was highly impressed. In the card he told me he would call that night with info on my gift. In addition to all the forethought required for the card he had even gotten me a gift! The only other time Hugh and I have exchanged gifts on January 8th was our wedding day. I was even more impressed and, since I absolutely love presents, very excited. When Hugh called me that night he said, "okay I've hidden a gift in your parents house. Walk over to the bookshelf. Now look for a book. It should be on the left side. It's called, 'A Prayer For Owen Meany...'"

Of all the things Hugh thought I might do between the 1st and the 8th of January, reorganizing my parents bookshelf wasn't one of them. My mom and I had both meant to ask Jay about those earrings but had forgotten about them and since I didn't know they were for me I was still surprised and very touched at the effort he went to in arranging it all in advance. And as if the earrings weren't memorable enough, I was also pregnant.

Which brings us up to this year. Anniversary 8. This year Hugh is on the couch recovering from a vasectomy. (No more anniversary babies for us!) And I am on the couch recovering from another day with 3 year old twins and a 3 month old baby. We didn't exchange gifts and we didn't even get each other cards. And frankly it doesn't even matter. We have beautiful, happy, healthy kids and we have each other. And that is all we need.

Although I am still hoping for a Mediterranean cruise. Maybe next year?