We had a marathon of a date for our five year anniversary this year. Lucky for us my mom happened to be in town, so we avoided the babysitter issue (at least for now). We headed to downtown Atlanta to explore this new city of ours. We walked through Olympic Centennial Park, had the most amazing dinner and dessert at Ruth's Chris, then walked over to SkyView Atlanta (the downtown ferris wheel). It was very nice, and Caiden would have loved it, but we both agreed it was kind of a one time thing, not really worth the expense. We were about to call it a night, but decided to walk off some of our delicious steak. Along the way we picked up some Falcon's preseason football tickets for $10 a piece and headed to the stadium. I guess the NFL is cracking down on what's allowed in stadiums.. you can only bring in clear bags and cameras that fit in the palm of your hands. For the record, I think this is super lame NFL so we only have iphone photos from the football game. But all in all it was an incredible night. Miles gifted me my beloved wedding band I have waited (patiently) five years for. I'm obsessed. I was blown away because we had decided on a $35 budget for gifts. I got creative and spent under $35. I made him a new letters journal because our previous one was out of pages [back story: for our first Valentine's day as a dating couple I wrote a few love letters in a journal and gave it to him. Since then we write love letters back and forth to each other. It's been an amazing way to journal our years together and is such a treasure] and I made him a wooden sign out of palette wood with our love story written out in dates. I thought I had stretched my budget in the best way. I was totally outdone. Of course, I stayed on budget and Miles blew it out of the water. So it's a give and take.
Now let me quickly talk about traditions. I am huge on traditions. I love seeing how things change and grow on a measurable time table. So when we got our wedding photos back five years ago I found an image I loved and said to Miles "we are recreating this photo every year." I love that this set of photos not only shows how we've changed. We take them every year on a bench that signifies that year of our life. We've been including Caiden in them too, and hope that 50 years from now we can still be limber enough to sit on a bench surrounded by our children and grandchildren.
