Nine years

Last Wednesday, while I was at the lake with the boys and my sweet hubby was typing blisters onto his fingers, our ninth wedding anniversary passed. He called me that morning early while I was wrangling bookworms and said "Happy Anniversary!" And I said, "Sorry, I didn't know it was Wednesday." (I did know that Wednesday was our anniversary - I just thought it was Tuesday again like some sort of Groundhog Day phenomena.) We chatted a minutes and then I went back to my wrangling career and he went back to typing and on Friday we kissed and hugged and hung out together and then on Saturday afternoon (after I had slept a few hours and somewhat recovered from a week of wrangling without my strong, stable counterpart) we went on a date.

As in, HE hired his cousin K to come and wrangle #2 and #3 for a bit and we went OUT away from them. Of course, we did want K to agree to come again, so we took #4 with us - he was gracious enough to nap most of the time we were out.

We went to the mall to check out a new store that we wanted to see, but we couldn't find a parking place within 982 miles of an entrance and I got cranky about that and he suggested that we skip the mall and head over to our favorite bookstore for some browsing and beverages. The iced tea was delicious. And I fell in love with three new cookbooks but didn't buy any of them.

Then we went to a little sushi joint, which he had visited before, but I had not. It looked like a sushi bar inside - red wall, black trim, Kanji on the walls, and black lacquered tables and chairs, simple and clean and modern. And at the back was the sushi chef with his neat and symmetrical piles of pink and white fish and shellfish (some cooked, some not) and uniformly cut vegetables. We sat, the waitress came, and we ordered: seaweed salad, several pieces of nigiri and several rolled treats. And for dessert, he ordered me some green tea ice cream - and that was REALLY yummy. It was a good time had by all, including #4 who was adored by the waitresses.

Then we came home and got the little bookworms to bed and I wrote a blog post and he worked until bedtime. Romantic, huh?

It's been a fantastic nine years in spite of all that has happened. I love my man. He's just plain amazing. :)