anniversary number 5 (of 100).

This past weekend, J.J. and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. Traditionally, the fifth anniversary gift is either wood (heh) or silverware. Instead, we went with...

Laser tag. We played laser tag and went out to dinner, and then I ate an entire wedge of chocolate fudge while J.J. sat with me in public and didn't wince or judge. Love, people. That's love.

We have a tradition of taking a picture every year in front of a dilapidated little red barn that sits on the lawn of our wedding venue. We got married at a local "farm" (it has goats and roosters, but I'm not really sure it qualifies as a farm so much as a farm-ish wedding venue), and one of my favorite wedding-day pictures was taken in front of this barn:

On our first anniversary, we both ditched work for the day and rode our bikes for miles all over Ann Arbor. We made sure to stop at the farm for a commemorative photo...helmet-hair, accidentally matching outfits, and all:

On our second anniversary, we went kayaking...and then back to the farm:

For our third anniversary, I was massively, uncomfortably pregnant and thought it would be cute to do a pregnancy photo shoot at our wedding site. Cute in theory, sure. But it turns out you should really do pregnancy pics earlier than 35 weeks' gestation, and not when it's so hot that your already-swollen body threatens to explode. We managed to get our barn shot, though.

We had a new participant for our fourth-anniversary photos - plus a mama who still hadn't slept a full night in eleven months and had about ten free minutes that day between pumping and washing pump parts to take a "cute" picture. Blah.

This year's farm trip - early in the day, before the customary fifth-anniversary laser tag games and fudge consumption - resulted in some great shots, thanks to my sister Carrie, who acted as our photographer. I love these ones:

And here's the one that will represent our fifth anniversary on the anniversary-photo frame wall that I'll do someday, when I get around to printing pictures. Like maybe by our tenth anniversary, or something.

Crazy that we've now celebrated more anniversaries as parents than as non-parents. Maybe one of these anniversaries, we'll make it back to our honeymoon destination. Maui sound good to you, Schnookums? :) Or we can just stick with laser tag. As long as I'm with him, it's bound to be good.