Anniversaries!!

Back a few months ago, on May 25th to be exact, Mark and I celebrated our 1 month anniversary! It was crazy at the time to realize that we had been married for a whole month, yet it felt like we had been married for much longer than that. Even more crazy is looking back from our perspective now, when we're coming on six months. How much life has changed in so many ways since our wedding.

We decided that for the first year, we would celebrate our first month by planning an activity together. Then we would switch off planning activities for the third month, sixth month, ninth month, and then one year anniversary. We definitely wanted to celebrate but weren't sure if we wanted to make a huge hoop-la every single month. In fact, this may be sad to admit, but we almost missed our second month anniversary. It wasn't until later in the evening that we realized it had come and almost past.

So, for the first month anniversary we were quite lucky. It ended up landing on Memorial Day (or is it Labor Day? I'm pretty sure Memorial is in the spring, but I always get those so confused and I don't want to look it up right now... look it up yourself if you are burning with curiousity... does this make me a lame blogger when I'm not willing to look up facts? or it just means that I'm months behind and trying to catch up). We decided to have a day up in San Francisco, but not before Mark surprised me with a beautiful bouquet of roses. Thankfully we hadn't been able to return the huge marble holder (as my new brother-in-laws called it when we opened the present as they were also chanting "take it back"), which worked as a beautiful vase and is a great addition to my kitchen decor.


We then drove up to San Francisco where we ate at a yummy Chinese restaurant called Eliza's. Such goodness. Because we apparently really like to eat, we then headed over to Ghirardelli Square for some ice cream. We walked around the little beach area nearby to chat and people watch.


We were a bit full so we just shared one cone, but it was so worth it. I absolutely adore Ghirardelli ice cream (as you can tell from the picture).


And Mark loves making faces, as you can also see from this picture. Oh sigh, I love this man!!


Just as an update: all of the roses in the bouquet eventually dried out and the petals all fell off, except for one. Which still remains in the vase as our "Beauty and the Beast" rose because I haven't found something else to put in the vase. Those petals are on for good!


Then, for our third month anniversary, I planned a little hiking and picnic adventure to the Big Basin Redwood Forest because neither of us had ever been. Unfortunately, Mark hurt his foot playing basketball just a few days before, which he kept telling me he could handle walking on, and he apparently doesn't like driving on windy mountainous roads. And let me tell you, the roads were definitely windy. Mark was such a trooper and went on all these hikes for the few hours we were there, even though his foot really hurt him. What a stud. I forgot my camera and literally have no pictures, but I just stole one off the internet machine of one of the amazing trees you can see there. The trees are so ginormous! They are ridiculously tall and ridiculously large. Some have been there literally for 2000 years and some are as tall as 329 feet! One of the most incredible trees was the Chimney Tree. They believe that several successive fires over years ignited the inside of the tree and created a chimney effect... meaning that the tree is literally hollow from top to bottom. It was insane. Here's the picture I yanked off the internet that someone took from the middle inside of the tree up towards the top:


Anyways, we had fun for both of our anniversary celebrations and we're looking forward to our 6-month later this month. I love Mark more and more and am so lucky to be married to him. Marriage is pretty amazing!