Jason and I celebrated our 20th anniversary back on December 22nd. One of my original goals of 2019 was to do something big to celebrate that anniversary, as we’ve never really done anything big for our anniversaries and it seemed quite a milestone. As the date approached, however, too much was happening. Morrigan’s navy situation was uncertain and we didn’t have a return date for him yet. We were in the process of buying a new house and getting our old house on the market. Plus there was the whole season of holidays, plus the kids being out of school, plus all the scrambling to figure out Morrigan’s next steps. We thought about throwing together a weekend in the hill country in a nice hotel, but 1) that was honestly not unlike other anniversaries where all we did was go spend a weekend away, 2) we didn’t know what our money situation would be with the house shuffling, and 3) we didn’t have a single weekend where we were both free. Eventually, we decided to put off our celebration until after the new year.

Then we put it off after Ash got sick.

Then we put it off until after we got Morrigan off to Kansas.

And then it was a month after our anniversary, and it started to seem a bit silly to do something now. I started talking about making our 25th anniversary the Big One, but I also knew that if we didn’t take action, the same thing would happen in five years. After all, we did the same thing at our 15th anniversary marker.

Somewhere in all of that, our anniversary celebration became known as the “planniversary” in our planners. We were always thinking of ideas and trying to come up with something that would feel sufficiently celebratory enough, and would be something we’d both want to do. This was the hardest part. Jason and I are very different in terms of  what we like and enjoy. Furthermore, Jason has a difficult time articulating his wants, and he tends to prefer to let others decide. But this was about US, not about ME, and I discarded ideas like a three-day cruise to the Bahamas, because that would be ALL ME and nothing of him. We went back and forth with ideas, and FINALLY, a month after our anniversary, Jason came to me with the itinerary for a week-long Alaskan cruise. That would fulfill both our interests and enjoyments, and is definitely sufficiently celebratory.

We booked our spots for May. It’ll be five months after our anniversary that we actually get to celebrate, but we found a week that will work for school, work, previous engagements, Morrigan’s college schedule, and our budget. We’re both very excited about this, looking at different things we might see or do at the individual stops. The month-long planniversary brainstorming was definitely worth it. Heh.