Celebrate 20

Steve and I usually celebrate our anniversary with a weekend getaway to a cute city within few hours of home. We do a lot of walking and exploring, and we eat lots of good food. We really look forward to these adventures. 

We would have loved to do a similar trip for our 20th anniversary, but the calendar was absolutely packed. Instead of traveling and spending a night or two in a hotel, it made more sense to plan something much closer to home. We had been wanting to do the Art Walk and eat at Thomas Keller's Per Se in nearby Yountville, so we decided that's how we'd celebrate 20 happy years. It was a sensible choice and, as it turns out, a fortuitous one. Exactly one week before our anniversary, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. If we'd made reservations to go away, we would have had to cancel them anyway. On the day of our anniversary, I had a peri-operative appointment, a two-hour online class about breast cancer rehabilitation and post-surgical physical therapy, and received five different calls from Kaiser. 

After all that, it was absolutely wonderful to head to Yountville with Steve and put cancer on hold for a few hours. The weather was perfect for the Art Walk and the food at Per Se was amazing. We had such a good time together. 

Celebrate 20 (affiliate link)

This is the first layout I made for the final game of the 2024 BYSS World Series. I earned a home run for the Scrappin' Banshees, one point each for using 3+ photos, a title, washi tape, and metallic paper, which is what I used for the punched hearts. 

I put all of the layouts I make chronologically into albums, with the exception of anniversary pages. Because I made a dedicated wedding album in 2004, it made sense to me in 2005 to make a dedicated anniversary album. I see the logic, but now I'm thinking that I wish our anniversary pages were interspersed with the rest of our lives instead of being separate. Whatever is going on in our lives (or in the world, in the case of COVID) has impacted our anniversary plans. That said, I am not going to be reorganizing 20 years' worth of albums in order to make this change. I'd rather spend the time documenting more memories.