ANNIVERSARY!

OH MY GOODNESS! Has it really been fifteen years? It really has. I think the time-space continuum is broken. Sometimes it crawls along at a barely discernable pace, and sometimes it just whooshes past, too fast to even blink.

On Wednesday, Mark and I celebrated our fifteenth wedding anniversary. It's a busy time of year at work for him, so we couldn't just take off and hole up in a b&b somewhere, like we wanted. But he took an extended lunch break, and we drove out to the country with our Chinese takeout.

And we had a picnic. All by ourselves. No toddlers or teenagers. Or even the obligatory "how is everything?" from the waiter. Just shade and song birds and schmoopsey us. It was perfect. 

No sweet and sour sauce, though. This is Mark testing the duck sauce, to see if it will do in a pinch. Apparently, it tasted amusing funny. 

And would you believe that in fifteen years, we've never done the cliche took-it-ourselves couples portrait? Well, we fixed that.

And then it was back to work for him, and domesticity for me. 

But wait! He completely surprised me by playing hooky from Mutual activities. He kissed me good-bye and took Hyrum to the church, and just as I had given myself over to running the home on my own for the evening, he walked back in the door. Ha! I didn't even see it coming.

We left Gabba in charge, and left. What did we do? Nothing daring or phenomenal. We ran a couple of errands, saw a couple of friends, watched the clouds and the sunset. And then ended up at Sonic for shakes.

It was a beautiful evening - especially for August! No bugs, balmy breezes. We sat and held hands and made jokes and talked shop and reminisced. It was wonderful. The truth is that I don't care what we do or where we go, just as long as I get to hang out with him.

Also, we bought a pack of 100 blank 3x5 cards, and daydreamed up our own "date deck," which is 100 different ideas of what we can do on a date. I was impressed, because we didn't have to really strain our brains until after the first 60 ideas. And it didn't get hard until the last fifteen or so. 

So now we have a stack of fun and interesting things we can do on a date, because Friday often finds us totally wanting to go out and do something, but too brain dead to figure out what "something" is. You should try this. It's fun. And if you want our list, I may just post it in the near future...nothing too personal to share. I mean, come on. We've been married fifteen years. How risque can it be? 

Because this is completely risque, right? Here I am, modeling the shake lids from both our drinks. There were two of them, and they fit very nicely over my ears, so I thought I would try them on.

Do I spend too much time around little children? It's possible. Who cares, we enjoy ourselves. Even if no one else gets our jokes, we think we're funny. And here's to, like, eighty-five more years being silly and schmoopsey. I love you, Mark Galbraith!