Five Beautiful Years!

Our first full day in Florida also happened to be our anniversary! What a happy day, right? We were so thankful that the day (weather-wise) turned out to be much like our wedding day. It's always a gamble to travel twenty-some odd hours from home and hope for good weather. No real control over that on our end, right? But we were so thankful for a warm, sunny, beautiful day.

Just like our wedding day, we got up early and went down to the beach to drink coffee, eat breakfast, exchange gifts, write letters, and wash each others' feet. It seemed busier this time than it did on our wedding day, but maybe on that day, it was really busy and we were just oblivious. So we sat out there with all the runners, yoga class folks, and birds, and had a magnificent time.

Ahhh...sunrise.

 My gift from Ryan!

 Four thousand points to him for researching on his own to find out the theme for anniversary #5 was wood and getting one of my favorite pictures of us put on pallet-style wall art. I love it!

 Ryan's gift from me. (I told him when they were wrapped and sitting together at home before we left that it was entirely possible we got each other the same thing. They matched!)

 I wrote him a letter on the back of this. It is my continual promise to him!

Hello, morning.

On our actual wedding day, we wrote letters to each other, rolled them up, and put them in these bottles, along with sand from our beach. Every year, on our anniversary, we read the letter from last year and replace it with a new letter. This year we got to continue the tradition on our beach again!

 Ryan got the water for our foot-washing.

 Sweet moments.

After our time on the beach, we recreated our wedding photos, like we do every year, but there are a ton of those, so I'll save that for another day. :) OH! And as we were getting ready for that, guess what we found? Our missing chalkboards. Ryan had packed them after all! So we own four now. Double the chalkboard fun!

Then we went on our date inspired by the letter V, so I'll tell you about that tomorrow.

After our date, we ran a few errands. I'd written thank you notes to the resort where we stayed and to the salon where I got my hair done on our wedding day, and we delivered those notes. We also went in search of cupcakes to have that evening, as is our tradition. We talked about these on the podcast, but here they are! Cupcakes in a jar! And we chose some interesting names. (Neither are representative of our feelings toward marriage or the last five years, thankyouverymuch.) Super super cute cupcake shop!

Amazingly enough, by the time we got done with all this, it was almost time for sunset. WHAT!? Weren't we just at the sunrise? We had heard there was going to be a wedding that night at sunset, and we were so excited, because we had so many beach lurkers attend our wedding that we wanted to see what that was like. So yep, we crashed a wedding! (From a respectable distance.)

The beach all set up. Reminded us a lot of our wedding day!

 Lurkers!!

 Wedding in progress:

 (The officiant told the wedding crowd to put their phones away and be present, so I didn't dare take more than that one picture. I was afraid I'd get kicked off the beach!)

Ryan got bored and started taking sunset pictures. I won't lie. He rocked them.

A little sand fun. :)

Since we'd had our fancy meal at noon (that story is tomorrow) we went low key for dinner. Ordered a pizza, watched our wedding video, and ate our aforementioned cupcakes with sparkling grape juice!

A very fun day, and the perfect celebration to five years!