Cotton Anniversary

The traditional gift for the 2nd wedding anniversary is Cotton.  While Chris and I didn't gift each other anything tangible this year, we do have a wonderful reminder of our cotton year!

How perfect is this?  Earlier this year the Texas A&M Aggies (where I went to college) participated in the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, TX.  I wasn't lucky enough to score any tickets but did watch the awesome game on TV.  My parents surprised us with this lovely framed picture as a belated anniversary gift.  One of my mother's co-workers took the picture which my mom had framed at Michaels. So thoughtful!!

In other news, Chris finished his busy spring semester and has begun his last (better be advisors or we're going to have some words) 4 electives for the summer.  As a break in between sessions, we took the day off and signed up for the lunch wine tour over in Grapevine (similar to the night one that we took back in 2011).

It was a great break from our regular routine and has us even more excited about our trip to San Francisco and Napa in a couple of months!  Should be a lot to celebrate in August!

If you're married, do you stick to the traditional anniversary gifts?  We did for the first year, but I'm not so sure that we'll stick to it in the years to come.

Two Years

Our second married year is now in the books!  Our anniversary was on Tuesday, but with Chris out of the house at 5:30am for work and not back until 9pm from class we didn't really celebrate until Saturday.  I couldn't let Tuesday go by without doing a little something so that night I picked up some creme brulee from Brio that we enjoyed after his class ended.

Hey Brio - Where's the caramelized sugar??

We didn't exchange gifts this year as the theme was "cotton" and we still have new bedding and bath towels from the wedding that we have not even opened (I can't wait to get them out of storage once we finally, knock on wood, start the house hunt this summer!).  Instead we gifted ourselves a couples massage Saturday morning (under cotton towels, so that's close - right?)

 and then headed out to the Melting Pot for dinner.

Our favorite drinks

Where we finally got our caramelized sugar fix with our dessert fondue!

I have a feeling that our next year is going to be a memorable one, so I can't wait to see what we have accomplished by the time year 3 is complete.

35 Years

Happy 35th Anniversary to my parents!!

Dad has been cleaning up during his retirement and found old documents from their wedding including directions to the New Jersey church for their Pennsylvania guests and the tux store options.  Amazing the amount of different colored tuxes that were offered in the 70s!

Love you two!

Our First Year

Our first year of marriage has flown by.  I can remember April 23, 2011 like it was just yesterday.

Being surrounded by the love of our friends and family is something I will cherish forever.  From the amazing moments, such as looking into Chris' eyes as we said our vows, to the funny moments like the cake dropping - I treasure the memories we made on that day.

Our first year for the most part has been amazing!  I'll be honest with you, it had it's low points too (from an outside source), but it taught us that we are stronger together.  Sometimes we just have to step away from a situation, focus on the good that we have in our lives and hope that time will heal the hurt that they caused us.

But enough of that, lets get to the celebration!!  Our family cruise was planned for the beginning of April so we decided to celebrate our anniversary a little early sailing the Caribbean.

On Isla Roatan, in our Mexican cooking class in Cozumel, enjoying a martini tasting on Carnival Liberty.

For our actual anniversary on Monday we kept to the tradition of eating the top tier of our wedding cake.  Here it is in all of it's glory on our wedding day.

And here it was a year later after defrosting for a couple of hours.

We never had a chance to taste it on our wedding day because our top tier was different from the two tiers that were cut. Chris and I love strawberries, but we didn't think that all of our guests would be big fans of strawberry cake/strawberry filling combo so we saved that just for us.  The cake part was a little dry, but the middle section with the filling was very tasty for year old cake!

After tasting the cake, we enjoyed dinner at Brio and exchanged gifts.

Since we're gearing up for a house hunt (yay!) we decided to keep it small and stick to the tradition of paper.  Each of us came up with something to add to our future gallery wall (thanks for the idea Amanda!).  I finally printed a couple of our wedding pictures and decided on a double frame.  The top half has one of my favorite detail shots, our rings on top of our personalized cake topper. The bottom frame contains the words we said as we slipped those rings on to each other's finger, printed in the font from our invites and matted on the green and blue cardstock that we used in our DIY projects.

Chris' gift was amazing and touching as always!  He took passages from the book he wrote for our wedding day and incorporated wedding images into the words "Love Of My Life!".

I can't wait to see what the next year brings for us!