Happy Anniversary to us!!!

Yep, you guessed it.  Today is our 9th anniversary.  Happy Anniversary to us!  We had a wonderful day…bright and sunny, surrounded by family and friends.  And even Elvis – but I’ll get to that.  Oh, and hundreds and hundreds of goldfish.  LIVE goldfish.  That’s an interesting story as well…

If you do the math, March 11 falls during Lent, no matter when Easter is.  I was raised Catholic and it is a no no to get married during Lent, and an even bigger no no to get married on a Sunday in Lent.  So I, the raised-Catholic bride, and my Protestant-raised Hubby were married on a Sunday, in Lent by a Mormon minister (Hubby’s beloved Uncle Jack) and not in a church.  Call us crazy.  But the fact that his uncle performed the service made it that much more special.  And the date was what really was important to us.  We wanted to get married 1 year to the date after we got engaged (however have you priced a Saturday night wedding?  If you have, then you’ll know why we got married on Sunday.  And one day off isn’t bad…)

The place where we got married, Addison Oaks, was previously the vacation house for one the influential families in Detroit, although after discussing it this morning, neither of us can remember which one and I don’t have time to look at the website.  Anyways they sold it to the park system and Voila! Perfect wedding/reception site.  We literally took the place over.  We had a luncheon reception immediately following the ceremony and the food was FAB!

(Sidenote: you can get married in their garden…in the summertime…and I can’t tell you how many people asked if we were getting married outside.  Um, hello?  You live here, right?  It’s March.  The ground is white….I don’t think so!)

And the cake was excellent.   We froze the top layer but after we returned from our honeymoon (in Paris) we found out we were moving to Dallas.  So we ate it as a going away cake since we figured it wouldn’t travel well.

And I’ll bet you are wondering about the Elvis comment, right?  After we got engaged and started pricing/planning our blessed event, we spent some time in the cardiac unit sticker shock.  And jokes were made about how we should have just gone to Vegas.  So my brother-in-law, the prankster, arranged for a visitor from The Heartbreak Hotel…

We seriously laughed our asses off.  Good thing I was wearing waterproof mascara.  I need to give credit to AJ –  he ROCKED THE HOUSE as Elvis.  And he had never done it before.  We still laugh about it today.

And then there were the goldfish.  After the reception, a bunch of us loaded up on a party bus and traveled to Windsor.  To the Windor Casino (now Caesars Palace)…where we planned to live it up.  We had a room overlooking for mucky dazzlingly spectacular Detroit River and the vacant, decaying buildings lights of downtown Detroit.  There was gambling…food…I walked around the hotel in my jeans, t-shirt and a tiara.  Good times.  About midnight I decided to retire to our home away from home.  I was tired and all I wanted was to soak my aching muscles in a hot bath.  I paid $5 for tiny bottle of bubble bath in the gift shop.  Hubby walked me up to our room and low and behold…what do we find?  Goldfish.  Live (although if I recall some HAD indeed perished) goldfish.  In the bathtub.  In the sink.  In the coffee cups.  In the toilet.  In every usable glass in the room. Just doing their thing – swimming and shitting.  And I burst into tears.  I was FUCKING FURIOUS.  Finally we did the only thing we could – FLUSH.  And FLUSH.  And FLUSH.  It was in the middle of the flushing that the perps (who remain nameless on this blog but everyone I know IRL knows who they are) decided to call our room to wish us goodnight.  I answered and when I was asked “What are you guys doing?  (insert snickering)” I yelled “Flushing fucking goldfish” and slammed down the phone.  See unsuspectingly we gave our room key to said perps – because they wanted to drop a bottle of wine in our room for later.  We thought nothing of it.  So I never got my bath.  There was goldfish poop all over the place.  And no coffee in the AM b/c the mugs had goldfish poop in them.  It was NOT the most pleasing end to our wedding day.  Now we laugh when we tell the story…as I am doing now while writing this.  But at the time…not so funny and definitely NOT a prank I recommend pulling on a pair of newlyweds.  Got it?  To this day, I do wonder every once in a while, if there are mammoth sized goldfish swimming the waters of the Detroit River.  I’ll have to ask my neighbor if he has seen any while fishing those waters…maybe he’ll catch one for me and I’ll have it mounted and sent to the deed doers as a souvenir.

So here we are, 9 years after our special day…what a wonderful thing.  Happy, still madly in love, with two amazing kids!  Life is good.   Tonight we are going to dinner…at a fancy place.  (Not sure where yet…) and Avery is going with us.  Her first super fancy dress up dinner.  She thinks she is Fancy Nancy.  I love it.

And to think it all started with the phrase, heard over a cubicle wall, “Really, you’ve been engaged twice?  Dana has been engaged twice too.  You should meet her.”

Followed by an argument over the Red Wing goalie…

Match made in heaven.

ETA:  I feel guilty and I must confess the truth.  I put up this exact a very similar blog post a year ago – on our 8th anniversary.  I edited and added some stuff…but the pictures are the same.   I was pretty confident no one who is currently reading my blog would go back a year to see what I wrote.  I almost felt like a plagiarist except I wrote the original post too.  Whew, feels good to get that off my chest!