Happy Anniversary!

3 years ago today John and I were married in the LDS Draper Utah Temple. I remember sitting with John, waiting for our marriage to take place and feeling sick to my stomach I was so nervous! :) 3 years seems like such a long time, but it has simply flown by! I feel so incredibly blessed to have been able to spend these 3 years with my best friend. And I can’t wait to see what new adventures are in store for us!

This also happens to be our first anniversary that we’ve been able to spend as just the two of us! Our first year we were in Hawaii with John’s family (not that we’re complaining – that was one of the best trips we took!!) and then last year John’s family came to visit for that weekend when we were living in Chicago, but on the day of our anniversary, I was working a 12 hour shift for my internship. And this year we almost spent it in Arizona! So while we have certainly had fun times the last two anniversaries, it was nice to have the day to ourselves this time ;)

So we’ve tried to be “traditional” and give each other gifts based on the traditional material by year. (For example, the 1st year gift is paper, 2nd is cotton, – we think it gets progressively more exciting the longer you are married because you’re typically dirt poor in your first year of marriage ;) This year’s material was leather. What?! Leather?! Both of us were at a loss as far as gift ideas went. I think it took both of us to the last minute before we figured something out, but it was a success! Yay! Go us! ;)

But first, I have to show you how awesome my gift wrapping scheme was. I happen to try to keep up with the crafting trends of the day and baker’s twine is so in right now ;) So are monograms. And book pages. As a result my gift wrapping was super trendy. Let me just show you
Awesome right?! John came home from work yesterday and was so impressed he let me put my initials on my gifts after he wrapped them. hee hee hee!! I went to the thrift store and found an old Webster’s dictionary for $1.20, which is what I used to cut out the letters. For the J’s I used a page from the J section, and an A page for the A’s! I even managed to get the words “anniversary” and “Auf Wiedersehen” (why is a German farewell in the English dictionary? no idea, but I loved it!) into one of the A’s too! Clever?! I know! ;)

But anyway, we started off the morning with a favorite: fruit smoothies and we exchanged gifts. We had decided that one gift would be the traditional material, while the others could be whatever we wanted to give. For John’s leather gift, I found a leather craft kit to make a leather belt buckle with an eagle on it and some leather finish. John does have a belt that uses belt buckles, if you were wondering and he loves it, so this was GREAT! I also found this really funny book at a store called Marbles (It sells games and books for your brain) called Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction and it’s filled with ideas and instructions on how to make little weapons out of office supplies and then I compiled a kit of the typical supplies that the book calls for:

So fun, right? I see lots of interesting Family Home Evenings/Date Nights in our future… ;)

John’s leather gift to me was a beautiful pair of black leather gloves! I am so excited to wear them this fall/winter! He also got me a gift card to amazon for my kindle (YAY! more ebooks!!!!!), and because I love me a good kitchen gadget, a cheese slicer. ha! Right before I opened it, he goes “this is probably the cheesiest thing I’ve ever gotten you”. It’s too bad our anniversary hadn’t been yesterday, when I actually really needed a cheese slicer when I made dinner. Funny how life works out sometimes…

John was able to get the day off today so that we could celebrate. We spent the day in DC and checked off a few more items on our bucket list! First off, an old favorite, the International Spy Museum! We LOVE that place. We successfully completed our ‘missions’ and didn’t blow our ‘covers’ and spent a good 3 hours there. The only bummer is that we can’t take pictures. I can kinda see why, but still – boo! But we had a great time learning about espionage and spymasters and looking at real life spy gadgets. We are both pretty sure we would never make it as spies. ;) On our way out through the Spy Museum Store, we got THESE!

Words cannot even express how excited I am to own these. Three guesses on what kind of cookies I’m making next!!! Mwa ha ha haaaa

After learning to be sneaky, we headed over to our favorite eating stop: Good Stuff Eatery! After stuffing ourselves with burgers and shakes we rolled headed over to the National Postal Museum. I was certainly surprised at all of the interesting things there were to learn about the history of the postal service. Unfortunately, we got there an hour before it was going to close, so we had to breeze through most of the exhibits, but we will probably go back at some point.
There were lots and LOTS of stamps. A collector would go nuts in a place like this.
I found some Bavarian stamps I liked :)

At that point it was already 5:30! The museum closed and it was time for us to head home. On our way back on the metro, we saw the Discovery Channel building on the outskirts of DC. How do we know it was the Discovery Channel? Well…I’ll just show you:

Happy Shark Week! ;)

And that is our 3 year anniversary celebration! It was such a fun day and I love being able to go on these adventures with John. I found one amazing guy! I sure do love you John!! Happy Anniversary!