You know how business’ celebrate their 10th, 20th, etc anniversary of being in business all year long? Well, marriage and family is more important than any business so Kara and I decided today that we’re going to make our 20th Anniversary a Year-Long Celebration instead of just on our anniversary date itself and stretch it out throughout 2012 with various big and small celebrations, activities and parties. Woo hoo!
Enter the 20/20/20 GIVEAWAY! Full details here!
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What are your favorite anniversary ideas, stories and memories? Please share them with us in the comments below!
January | February | March | April | May | June
July | August | September | October | November | December
January
January 19th: My wife Kara’s blog post “20 Years” — A touching and funny tribute of our life together
Yes, it made me cry. Best gift I’ve ever received! Wow! I’m tearing up, folks, sap that I am. What a touching (and funny) review and tribute of our life together. Thanks, baby! BEST anniversary gift I’ve EVER received.
January 30th: Decision to make this a full year-long anniversary celebration.
February
February 12th
- Press Release: Valentine’s All Year Press Release 2012
February 14th
- Valentine’s Waffles for Kara and the kids.
- Unveiling of this year’s anniversary logo above. This always goes on the back window of her vehicle. This is part of my approach of Valentine’s All Year and ongoing courtship. (see past years logos here).
- Play Day.Our friendship began long before our love affair did. We were friends in college, poor students, who found lots of cheap, creative and fun ways to have fun bumming around campus: Chalk dancing, dirt-clod fights, singing 70′s TV show theme songs, looking at the “pickled people” in the science building and so on. So today we’re just playing. Here’s today’s play agenda:
- —Go to our children’s schools together and buy candy grams for them.
- —Go to our alma mater BYU
- ——Pal around like the good old days and reminisce.
- ——Enjoy the art at BYU’s Museum of Fine Art
- ——Get ice cream at the BYU Dairy
- —Slick track go-cart racing
- —Shopping
- —Listening to our 20th Anniversary Playlist (listen here) throughout the day as we drive around.
- Drove all day with this all over our vehicle “Just Married… 20 years ago today!” Thanks kids!
KSL Channel 5 live interview of our 20th Anniversary Year Long Celebration. Woo hoo!
Dinner at Franck’s. French cuisine. Our third anniversary there. Kara’s a real foodie, a culinary genius and appreciates fine food like no one I know. She knows what all the fancy words on a menu means that no one else understands. It’s fun to listen to her describe how certain foods are made and the history of certain methods or techniques.
February 18th
- 20th Anniversary Party. A small party with local family and friends.
March
March 30, 2012: Kara and I went to the “Keeping the Love Alive” Date Night Seminar.
By Michelle Weiner-Davis, best-selling author of Divorce-Busting, hosted by StrongerMarriage.org
Michelle is one of the key leaders in my field and has greatly influenced the Solution-Focused work I do with my clients. It was great to learn from her again. Kara and I both enjoyed her presentation. And after I introduced Kara to my new fav find: Rusted Sun Pizzeria (num!) with the most amazing calzones and spumoni for dessert.
April
Moab, UT hiking trip
May
Marriage Enrichment Weekend Retreat
June
Park City overnight date
July
WaveRunner Date
August
Horseback riding on the trails of Sundance
September
Marriage Getaway, Aspen Grove, UT. I highly recommend these Marriage and Weekend Getaways. They are affordable, insightful and fun.
October
Alaskan Cruise
November
Las Vegas overnighter
December
Announcing The 20/20/20 GIVEAWAY!!!
What are your favorite anniversary ideas, stories and memories? Please share them with us in the comments below!
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20 Years is…
2 Decades
240 Months
1,044 Weeks
7,305 Days
175,316 Hours
10,518,975 Minutes
631,138,519 Seconds
And counting…
“Lucky” My Eye
And to think some fool said to me that my wife and I were “lucky” to have such a great marriage. Yeah, right. That’s what it is: “luck.” Luck my eye. Our great marriage is time put in, work done, study done, lessons learned, bad habits undone and good habits hard-won. Don’t you dare cheapen my kick-ass marriage by calling what we have CREATED “lucky.” Might as well call Warren Buffet’s wealth luck or Michael Jordan’s skill luck. But, if you call working your butts off to a commitment and never giving up “luck” then I wish you all the best luck in the world!
Any of my clients who have done The GREAT Relationship Work can also well attest that their accomplishments had nothing to do with luck, but with choice, commitment, and LOTS of hard work. Their turn-arounds and transformations didn’t “just happen” and didn’t come cheap. Their relationships are GREAT because they were EARNED the hard way, the old way, the only way—doing the right work the right way and refusing to cut corners. Excellence only.
Past Anniversaries
- Past “I Heart Kara” Anniversary Logos
- Links to the ongoing 52 Love Songs and 365 Love Quotes Projects which I started for our 18th Anniversary.
- The first Valentine’s All Year with 365 Love Quotes and Poems was presented in these cool apothecary jars.
- Various Anniversary pics
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Unfortunately, we had some kind of family traumatic event or emergency every year on our anniversary. It became so common that we didn’t plan anything for our anniversary because we knew someone would end up at the hospital or some other event would keep us from celebrating it.
On our eight year I decided “enough is enough” and planned our anniversary anyway. I planned the delivery of a dozen roses every day for 8 days with a note that told my wife what to be wearing when I got home from work. I had babysitters planned for all 8 evenings, dinner taken care of, and 8 dates planned out, one for every single night.
These 8 dates represented the previous 7 years of not being able to celebrate our anniversary and the current year of insisting on celebrating our anniversary. At the end of the week-long celebration, my wife had 8 dozen roses of all colors. The house smelled like a florist. We had gone on 8 fabulous dates of various activities. Some with jeans and T-shirts, some with dresses and suits, and everything in-between. We had the most fun we’ve had in years!
To top it all off, not a single thing went wrong that year. Nobody went to the hospital. Nobody got injured. Nobody went missing. It was a great year, and we have celebrated our anniversary every year since.
Ironic thing is that yesterday we celebrated our 13th anniversary and started the day with my wife’s grandma’s funeral, three doctor appointments, one big surprise for our family, then a nice dinner. A full day of roller-coaste emotions, but it ended really nice (we were soo pooped that we went to be three hours early). ;)
Eric, this is why we are such kindred spirits my brother–two hopeless romantics who love to make our women feel loved, adored, cared for, valued and appreciated. Plus it makes us look like mega studs! I never knew that story about your 8th anniversary. One of the best anniversary stories I’ve ever heard!
CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!! Three and three or two and four…WONderful, WONderful, you WON lottery, again. It’s because you two are so good at being TEAM BARKLE! ♥ U. U inspire, thank you, thank you, thank you!
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