It was our wedding anniversary this week. Our eighth anniversary. Which we celebrated by being on opposite sides of the United States. Because we’re romantic like that.

Seriously. Nothing says romance like having the bed ALL TO MYSELF FOR 4 GLORIOUS NIGHTS!  

Ok, I really did miss my hubby. But let’s just say that of all our anniversaries so far, the best one was…our wedding day. Which isn’t an anniversary. But that just goes to show you far downhill things have gone since.

Not our marriage. No, our marriage is going strong. At least I’d like to think so. Even if we’re not as young and thin and eternally optimistic as we used to be (*one* of us gave birth to two babies since eight years ago and both of us have been through some major life-changing events, not all of them positive). Even if we’re no longer so sweet and mushy it makes your teeth hurt. Our relationship is no longer the high fructose corn syrup brand of sweetness. Now we’re more like a rich, dark chocolate. Less sweet, but more satisfying.

Let’s review the anniversaries of the past:

2001 - Anniversary the first: We made BIG plans to celebrate in style. By “style” I mean driving to the capital city of Saskatchewan (which is not especially spectacular), the only other reasonably big city in the province, for two nights’ stay in a hotel.  I had grand romantic hopes for that weekend. Celebrating a whole year of marriage and the fact that we had weathered two extremely traumatic events in a very short period of time (the death of a brother and the loss of our home to a fire). I wanted to congratulate ourselves. I wanted marital bliss, dammit! While we did go away, I have a vague memory of being *somewhat* cranky the whole weekend (I know, so UNEXPECTED from me!).  To this day I’m not sure why. Luckily, my husband forgave me my bad mood and we moved on into year two.

2002 - Anniversary the second: We were travelling in British Columbia this year, having just been to northern BC for my best friend’s wedding.  I don’t remember exact details, but I think it must have been fun-ish.  I have no memories of death or destruction or severe bitchiness. (Husband, no comments from you, thankyouverymuch!)

2003 - Anniversary the third: Our daughter was born ten days before our anniversary. So this year I was a postpartum MESS.  After a long and unproductive labour I had an emergency c-section followed by a baby who was infected with TEH COLIC and cried 23.5 hours a day.  On our “special day” this year I was back in the hospital with severe pain and undergoing a battery of tests to determine what was wrong with me. (Which was apparently NOTHING. Except a bad case of being an ENORMOUS BABY.) Details aside, it was a sucktastic day with no celebration of any kind other than some pretty good painkillers the hospital gave me.

2004 - Anniversary the fourth: Ok this year was kind of a fun one because we had actually gone through a whole year of parenting an extremely difficult baby who had blossomed into a perfectly lovely toddler and we were able to leave her overnight for the first time and enjoy about 16 hours of time to ourselves. We got a hotel room (in the city this time) and went out to a nice dinner and a movie and SLEPT IN LATE!  It was HAWT, baby.

2005 - Anniversary the fifth: I don’t remember the exact details of this year, but I’m pretty sure our day was lost among the difficult final days of another hard goodbye. No one felt much like celebrating that August.

2006 - Anniversary the sixth: This time I was two months postpartum. Not exactly looking or feeling great. But we had planned an exciting trip to Ottawa, where neither of us had ever been, to attend the wedding of a dear friend on our anniversary! What fun!  We were really thrilled about the opportunity to leave our daughter with my parents, even though we’d be schlepping along the baby.  What I did not anticipate, when the trip was planned and I was still pregnant, was that I would be lucky enough to have another colicky baby.  That trip coincided with the peak of his hellish and inconsolable crying and refusing to nurse.  I’m pretty sure we provided MORE THAN AMPLE birth control for anyone who saw us that weekend, looking haggard and defeated.  I slept about ten minutes the whole weekend and we ended up cutting the trip short by several days in order to flee to my parents’ house where we could take advantage of them had free babysitting and get some extra sleep. Nothing says “I love you” like synchronized pillow drooling.

2007 - Anniversary the seventh: The hubby was in the midst of an intense one year MBA program in Ontario and I ditched him to visit family.  Again with the romance! It never stops around here, folks.

2008 - Anniversary the eighth: The hubby is on the west coast for work. I am in a nice apartment close to downtown Boston (lots of tourist attractions) with two little kids. Which would be great except I’m trying to keep the kids from DESTROYING the nice apartment. And because it’s been raining 29 hours a day here for the WHOLE SUMMER, keeping the furnishings in tact has become a 29 HOUR A DAY JOB.

So what kinds of romance will the upcoming years spell for us? More hospital visits or family tragedies? Perhaps a natural disaster or two? At this point, a quiet evening at home sounds pretty inviting.  I’m still holding out hope that at some point in the future we will have the money, time and opportunity to take some kind of a trip to Mexico or somewhere else warm and exotic to celebrate the fact that we are happy and healthy and have had each other to cling to through good times and bad.