10th Anniversary Recap

Bear with me as I chronicle our 10th anniversary.

Matt and I talked about gifts, and while he really wanted to buy me something expensive like diamond earrings (something I mentioned years ago would make a lovely 10th anniversary gift), I talked him out of it. I know, what girl tells her husband NOT to buy her something sparkly? Normally, not me. However, since we’re wanting to move in the spring and there is so much furniture we want to buy, I convinced him that the guilt I’d feel when wearing the equivalent of a new dining room table (which I’m dying for) on my earlobes was not worth it. Instead, I told him, I wanted a new necklace, similar to one that my friend Mara has. I’m so, so glad we made this decision – check it out!

The etsy shop is called PureJoy, and the woman who runs it is simply amazing. We communicated back and forth several times and she created such a special piece of jewelry for me! I told her this was for our 10th anniversary, and she added a little heart charm, and she stamped the number 10 on the back to commemorate it for us. I love little personal touches like that (and because I was so enamored of how it looked on the front, I didn’t even notice for a few days that it was there, but I love it!). If you aren’t shopping etsy, you don’t know what you’re missing. It’s an online marketplace for handmade and vintage items and it’s incredible.

I put some thought into Matt’s gift as well. The “traditional” 10th anniversary gift is tin or aluminum, which is fascinating. But the “modern” 10th anniversary gift is diamonds (sidenote: is this because too many marriages don’t last these days, so the diamond industry lowered the standard to sell more gems? Curious.). To go along with the tin/aluminum idea, I got him new tools for the grill, and I planned to have them engraved with our monogram. Except they couldn’t do it at the store I went to, so scratch that idea. Our old grilling tools were getting pretty beat up, and while the new ones aren’t made of tin or aluminum, I’m pretending they are. Now, for the diamond idea, I decided to get him the Diamond Anniversary edition Scrabble game and The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary.  I pretty much brought our Scrabble dorkiness to a whole new level. 

On our actual anniversary, we went to the young marrieds small group that we lead for our church, so on Saturday night we had dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.  Delicious.  And very buttery.  And did I mention delicious?  And that this is the kind of place where a guy comes by and cleans the crumbs off your table for you with a special little crumb-sweeper tool? (PS to that guy: if you need part-time work, come on over, dude.) We picked Ruth’s Chris because on our 8th anniversary, Jack Henry was 2 weeks old, and Matt went there for dinner with clients. While he totally had my blessing (I mean, really, where was I going to go with him? Burger King drive-thru?), I did tell him he owed me a meal there.

I’ll leave you with a picture from our Scrabble game tonight. I FINALLY won a game, and I put a little message on the board and ran to get my camera, knowing that this post was nearly written and ready to post. While I was away, Matt moved my tiles and added his own message at the bottom, irritated at the play that ended up costing him the game (he played the word “ants” and I made it into “antsy” and also spelled “very” over a triple word score). He wasn’t thrilled at my 64-point-play.