Celebrating A Wedding Anniversary

About a month ago my wife and I shared our Sixth Anniversary.  I couldn't help but think about the previous years, what we did, and invariably where we went.  While six years doesn't at first seem like much (compared to my wife's parents 51 years), to my wife and I it has been huge, and forever life changing.  From bringing three children into the world, moving 2 times, and making a huge career change, our anniversaries have been a wonderful time for us to celebrate another year closer to one another.

This would be the first year we didn't do anything "special" for our big day.  There were not any presents, and we didn't go out.  Budgetary constraints, time constraints, and energy constraints has severely limited our ability to do many things.  Even with all that, it has not effected our desire to celebrate marriage.

As I have recently become enraptured with cooking and menu preparation I took to creating our dinner night in. Many weeks prior to our anniversary very large Caribbean lobster tails went on sail for $8, at the same time untrimmed beef tenderloin went on sale.  I had prepared the tenderloin weeks previous, but while trimming had some lovely petite tenderloin tips I saved.  With a base for the meal set, a "surf and turf" I went on to planning the whole meal.  I made a favorite of ours a potato leak soup for a starter.  For our salad course we had arugula salad with toasted pecans, goat cheese, topped with fresh green apples and a home made Dijon mustard vinaigrette (a completely original recipe).  We had a toasted baguette with the salad and soup.  Our main course was a home made creamed spinach, with barbecued lobster tail and barbecued tenderloin tips.  The desert was Fossleman's ice cream (pistachio, espresso fudge, and dark chocolate).  All in all I think I spent around $40 dollars for dinner (easily what we would have paid for babysitting alone), I can only imagine the cost at a fine dining establishment (we guessed about $250).  What was so nice was even the next day we had left overs for our lunch, I made myself a lobster burrito, and Cristina had a Steak Burrito, and man those were awesome (and free.)

While I prepped during the day to cook, I didn't start the grill until the kids were asleep.  Once they were down, my wife went to town setting a grand table.  A black table cloth given by my mother-in-law as well as some beautiful chrome chargers.  She set the table with the china given to her by her grandmother.  The silverware was my Swetka family silver.  Our crystal was a wedding gift from the Falcons and Horowitzs, our pots and pans that prepared our food was wedding gifts from more of our friends, and even the ice cream scoop came from a close girlfriend of my wife's.  The candles were holders from our honeymoon in Fiji that we saw and bought on the main island.  With the tremendous amount of love received from family and friends to celebrate our meal, you couldn't help but feel loved, and realize what a great foundation we have been given in starting our lives together.

I'd be lying to say we had tons of conversation, it was mostly just eating, and relaxing.  Though we did talk some about who gave us what, and how cool it was to realize what a great way to start our life together, the majority of the night was us just being content together and enjoying wonderful food.  The dinner, the quiet house, the table setting and everything given to us was out of love.  While time in a quiet restaurant is most often a wonderful luxury, I wouldn't have traded anything for our Sixth Anniversary dinner, and I can't imagine a restaurant could have provided us such a wonderful feeling of being surrounded by the ones we love.