Happy Anniversary!

Ok, first of all, I absolutely cannot believe it’s June! What happened to this year?

Yesterday was my fifth wedding anniversary. I can’t believe it’s been that long in many ways, but in others it’s amazing all we’ve done and seen in that time.

We didn’t really get to celebrate our anniversary until last night. My husband had baseball all day, so he left ummm before I woke up and didn’t get home until near the end of naptime. That was fine though, as Mister Man had a birthday party to go to that I didn’t want to have to miss, and it gave me a chance to go to the new gym and try things out.

Once we dropped the wee ones at my parents’ house, who graciously volunteered to watch them – as usual – we headed to dinner. I know this will come as a shock to anyone who knows anything about me, but we went sushi. The restaurant my husband chose was chi-chi sushi, which is always fun to try. Personally, I’m just as good getting a bunch of sushi from Mitsuwa and having a picnic with a bottle of wine on our deck (about 1/5 the cost) but I’m not going to rain on his parade.

I will say that the sushi was pretty good there. My seaweed salad came with spicy tuna and avocado chunks atop it, which was a nice twist. I also got two funky rolls – one of which had cilantro, tuna, green peppers and something else and was wrapped in something other than nori, while the other was softshell crab topped by tuna. If you’re in Palatine, I can give a thumbs up to Sushi-Ai (which my husband kept calling A I Sushi -- that cracked me up!).

Afterwards, I spoiled myself by insisting we go to Cold Stone. I looooove Cold Stone but very rarely go there. In fact, it’s probably been close to a year since I’ve been there.

As usual, they didn’t have my favorite flavor. When I was in California on business a couple years ago a woman who worked for me and I went to Cold Stone, and they had carrot cake ice cream that was literally like eating carrot cake. It instantly became my favorite ice cream flavor. Alas, it was a seasonal flavor and I’ve yet to see it again. (If anyone at Cold Stone or any other ice creamery is reading this and can get me back my carrot cake ice cream, I’ll either love you or hate you forever – I haven’t decided which yet!)

Fortunately, cake batter is an acceptable substitute and a flavor they always have. Mmmm cake batter with brownies, caramel and chocolate sauce. Yum! As I mentioned, we were spoiling ourselves, so I managed to actually eat my entire bowl. Generally, I eat about a quarter of it and bring it home and savor it for the next two weeks. Since this is the only fifth anniversary I plan on celebrating, I decided I could choke down the whole bowl though!

Oh, and of course we had our gifts. I got my husband a new wooden barbeque tools set and a wireless talking grill thermometer so he can no longer blame getting distracted on food under or overcooking. Not that this ever happens in our house. And not that some members of my extended family are particular about how their meat is cooked that is very different from how we like our meat cooked. Just saying.

For me, apparently I should show my husband things I read more often. I showed him a swing that Jeff had built – twice, mind you – and mentioned how cool that was. My gift was my choice of swings. But I had to choose which one. The difficulty now is figuring out where to put it, since we have a walkout basement that slopes down throughout the yard until you get to the conservancy (woods for normal people) and the front doesn’t really work. Still, good to know that he’s listening. Disturbing that neither of us obviously had our act together for gifts until this week!

Oh yeah, and we were in bed by 10:30. How sad is that? We did get home well before then – ok by 9:15 I think – but still that’s so sad and early to go to sleep. Although I will say that it felt nice to sleep until 8:25 this morning. All in all, a pretty decent anniversary. Especially since I had half of a sushi roll leftover that I got to eat for breakfast. Yum!