Overdue Anniversary Blog

My Sailor has been adamant that I do an anniversary blog. After all, the guy has a point. Credit where credit is due, he did a good job remembering August 12th, where a village worth of our friends and family got together to make the day amazing. It's a memory with my family that I'll always cherish. A year later, I'm constantly looking back at photos and remembering my family happy, smiling, and relaxed, despite the looming cloud that was Dad's cancer prognosis.

At Stone Brewery with the family in Escondido, a few days before the wedding.

Despite all the craziness that comes with any wedding, it was a fun, good day all around. My parents' 40+ year anniversary was only a few days later.

This year, I didn't expect My Sailor to be home, so I made arrangements to go on the first annual 'girl's trip' with my mom. (See previous blog post for photos and a break down of that trip.) It also lined up with D23 Expo, so it gave me a great 'excuse' to head down to California anyway.

That said, when My Sailor turned up at my door, that changed our plans of, well, not celebrating this particular anniversary. See, while some military families post-pone holidays, we've never really done that. I tried to post-pone Christmas a few weeks one year, but it just turned into this 'Ooo! Look! Presents for Sailor Boy!' thing, rather than something that even remotely felt like a Christmas holiday celebration. So after that, we just decided to let the days pass as they would. If he was home for one, great! We'd celebrate that occasion together! If he wasn't, I'd send him with cards and notes and we'd celebrate them apart - however they celebrate things in the silent world of Submarines.
 
So I had packed a bunch of anniversary cards and goodies into his seabag, which, on August 12th, sat in the dining room, while I was galavanting down the coast.

But he decided that letting the day go unmarked wasn't quite enough, so he had flowers delivered to the hotel.

 Cool, huh? It was definately a nice touch, even though I didn't get to spend much time in the room enjoying them.

When I walked in the door a few days later back in our home in Washington, he had these beauties hanging out on the dining room table waiting for me.

 

So, yeah he did pretty well with flowers!

He'd bought some steaks from a local butcher (grassfed, humanely raised awesomeness) and told me of his plans for a home made steak dinner on our balcony. Seeing how much the day ment to him took me from "eh, I wasn't around for it, so we'll just let it go," to "Yeah! This is gonna be awesome! Some actual romantic time! Steak dinner, wine, sunset with a view, flowers... wow!"
Well.... then the next day came. Exhaustion and travel laundry set in and we decided to put it off 'one more day'.
The next morning, we found that our roomie had come home from 2 weeks in Japan visiting his family. Eager to hear his stories, we treated him out to breakfast. During breakfast, My Sailor offers to make Soba (a Japanese buckwheat noodle speciality we make once or twice a month) and do dinner all together...
And then there was Duty (you know, that 24+ hr shift).
And then he was sick...
And then he'd had a REALLY bad day...
And then there was Duty again...

I've been home a week and we FINALLY ate the steaks!

Last night... In front of the TV... While watching Anime.
(For the record, we agreed that this does NOT count as our 'annivesary dinner' which now 'might' happen Saturday night...)
Since My Sailor's birthday (the big 30) is only a few days away, my expectations are lowered to realistic levels now, but he still gets 2 points for flowers, -1 point for rescheduling the dinner... so he still comes out ahead!