Did I tell ya'll about this anniversary we have coming up?

It's kind of an anniversary, not our wedding anniversary (that's in June or July, we can never remember). It's our engagement anniversary. It's on Christmas so we don't normally celebrate it by itself but the dh does take note of it on occasion. Why he and not me? Because his comment at the time was that he'd never be able to 'one up' me on a Christmas present. He had wanted to get married once we found out that we were having a baby, my theory for the refusal was that a baby was not a good enough reason to get married and I didn't want to make any major decisions while pregnant. Like, you know, what to wear in the mornings, things like that. We had already moved in together and that counted as my quota for major decisions that year.

DD was born in October and we all survived that. Barely. And by the holidays I figured it'd be nice to surprise him. I got a hold of his good friend that was a jeweler and asked her if she knew what kind of ring he wanted. He's not a plain band kind of guy, he's got style. More than me actually. Sadly. So anyway I found out what kind of ring he liked (you know, that one I told ya'll about him losing that one time recently? Yeah that one) and went out and bought it. I also told his mom what I was up to. Kinda like that old fashioned thing where men ask the father of the woman permission? Yeah only his mom was dying for us to get married so I didn't really ask her, I informed her and she immediately took over planning the wedding. Like as in picking up the phone right as I was standing there. Yeah no permission needed there. She had a date picked for the wedding within minutes. Which is fine, I've been married before and did the white dress wedding thing. I didn't want to plan a wedding. I would have liked to elope to Vegas and be married by Elvis. He wasn't going for that one though and I didn't even bother mentioning it to his mom. His family is more stodgy than mine. Understatement of the century if ya'll didn't catch the sarcasm through the internet.

So on Christmas day 2001 I had wrapped up his box with the ring. Then I put it in a bigger box. And a bigger box, and then another bigger box. There may have been 5 or 6 boxes by the time I was done and the biggest box was about 4 ft x 4ft. A ring box is obvious, this one, not so much. I sat with the dd in my arms as he opened the box, and then looked at me funny when he got to each consecutive box. I think he figured out the ruse by box 3 but the expression on his face when he got to the ring box was great. I think his words were "Are you serious?". Oh yee of little faith. Less than a year had passed of us dating and he had already given up on getting to marry the mother of his child. Poor man. I keep telling him that if he wants to lessen the stress in his life he needed to marry a man. He never listens! Can't say I didn't warn him.

Christmas, therefor, is an anniversary of sorts for us. We never celebrate our regular anniversary anyway, we can never remember it!