10 Dates for 10 Years

Our 10th anniversary is coming up soon. Who would have thought we would have 8 kids by then? We sure could have never dreamed something so wild up! ;) Since I was pregnant just one month after our wedding (and we eloped, he was born two weeks early, you KNOW people are doing the math in their heads, it's cool.... It was one full month AFTER we were married- honest, lol) so most of our anniversaries have been finding a babysitter so we could go out to dinner. We've always said that our 10th we would GO BIG in celebrating. Since we eloped we thought about maybe having a big reception party for our anniversary party (this is before we knew of the 5 new additions to our family). That's not likely to happen because of finances and, well... I think we have enough stress (even if it's good stress) in our lives without throwing a big expensive party. Then we started looking in to cruises since we live right here in LA area where so many ships are. We were close to going with that but for a few days cruise it's quite a bit of money, we would have to find someone to keep the kids overnight during that time, and the ships pretty much just go to places that we've already been too and are not all that exciting to us. SOOOOOOOOOO... here's the idea we have come up with... 10 dates for 10 years!

We estimate that we have only been on about 4 dates over the last almost 2 years. We imagine when we have more children we will get out even less (even though that's barely possible). So we came up with the idea of instead of going somewhere else we will stay right here in So CA and go on 10 extravagantly fun or romantic dates. We are really excited about this plan. We've got 7 of the dates we want pretty for sure planned and have a list of fun maybe's too. I'll share them as we go along. I am totally looking forward to them all!!!!!

Today we are doing the last minute errands and packing for our Thanksgiving vacation trip. If we have time we also want to meet up with a friend that Jim has been friends with for over 30 years. They lost touch for the last 7 years just to find out that we live really close to each other now! When we last saw them we had just a toddler and newborn and they were just about to get married. They now have 3 children and one on the way (all ages 4 and under) and we can't wait to meet them!

While on our vacation trip we will be near where we had our very first date. So if we can sweet talk a family member in to watching our boys we are going to kick off our 10 dates for 10 years by recreating our very first date together. I hope it works out-- I'll keep you posted. I better get packing!