Two weeks ago, dear husband and I celebrated 32 years of marriage, the weekend of August 17th. I insisted we spread out the celebration over four days. I really had to stand fast and follow through with this vision, as all sorts of temptations came to pull us into ordinary life with our ordinary responsibilities. These temptations threatened to obliterate all celebratory plans, including a major two-day event for my homeschool co-op. I didn’t want to postpone my anniversary plans to accommodate these other things. I felt it was important to put my marriage first and nurture it. If I didn’t, and put it off, the plans would then just fall apart as the weeks went on with school starting and more responsibilities added on. I just knew that would happen. So, I held fast and carried through with my plans. It was such a needed break from the day-to-day grind, a wonderful spell of days to recharge our batteries for the upcoming school year. My husband works long hours with an hour commute each way. We badly needed this time together.

Our marriage has had ups and downs like probably all marriages do, but overall, it is getting better and better! It’s this upward spiral journey of increasing joy and connection. It’s like wine that gets better with age. Not that I’ve ever had wine, that’s just what I’ve heard about some wine, LOL.

So, to celebrate my increasing joy of being a traditional wife, 32 years of it in fact, in the spirit of #tradwives, I am blogging all about our multi-day anniversary party. I spread out the celebration over a few days: Thursday night through Sunday night. We did these activities:

-having some romantic conversation by a fire in a fire pit in our front yard, using the book full of quizzes for couples (which I looooove doing), shown above. Another thrifting treasure!

-eating out. We went to a buffet restaurant and ate every bit of fatty meat we could find for staying on our carnivore diet: ribs, roast beef, fish and steak.

-watching a romantic comedy, it was so fun and thought-provoking, but ugh, the language was a little offensive a few times. I’m always on the look-out for pure romantic comedies about married life so let me know if you know one in the comments below

-eating Lily’s stevia chocolate, which took us off the carnivore diet, LOL. I bought two bars for each of us. We nibbled them through the weekend. Sometimes you just have to take a break from strictness, as long as you are willing to deal with the consequences. It did slow down my weight loss but I’m not in a race to be a certain size in a movie or anything like that. I surprised myself by being too full after the carnivore bash at the restaurant so that I couldn’t even eat any during the rom com. I actually had leftovers that lasted more than a week.

-sleeping in (which I love as well!)

-going thrifting (which I also loooove). This is something I usually do by myself. I think the last time I went thrifting with the hubs was New Year’s Eve of 2009. I’ve been wanting to go thrifting with him for a few months now. We each found one amazing treasure! See below. I have started Jordan Peterson’s book more than once on audio and never finished. One of my sons asked for the hard copy book last Christmas. It was hard to find at an inexpensive price on amazon, separately, not in a bundle, so we I sent my husband to hunt it down at Barnes and Noble for over $20. It was so great to find it at Savers’ for $8 so I can have my own copy. Pricey for a thrift store book but given that it’s even more expensive to buy new I was happy to pay $8. Now my son and I can discuss it! Then there’s the Princess Bride. That one needs no explanation. We’ve watched it a lot but haven’t ever had our own copy.

-going to the temple to do marriage sealings as proxy work for deceased distant relatives (which I also love). That was wonderful! We did names that my children did baptisms for years ago at the Tucson Temple when we lived in AZ.

-watching a movie as a family. This was a movie I’ve been wanting to watch with DH for years, ever since my sister showed it to me at a family gathering that my husband missed. It’s the movie below, called Dangal. Dangal is an amazing movie based on a true story of a father who mentors two of his daughters to be wrestling champions in India. It has lots of thought-provoking moments about family life and mentoring. You can read more about it here.

– playing board games as a family (with just the two kiddos left at home at a cabin in the mountains (which I also love). See games below.

Playing games is one of my absolute favorite things to do. It was so fun!

I really lucked out finding the game How Do You Doodle? the week before when thrifting. It made us all laugh hard several times. How funny it was to look at my husband’s attempt to draw “beauty.” See below. He was attempting to draw a beauty pageant winner to denote beauty, but she looks more like a sad-trying-to-be-happy, deteriorating, ill-proportioned Statue of Liberty.

Look at my teen daughter’s drawings below! She is an amazing artist! Can you tell the bottom right hand corner drawing is for “medication”? Yes, I bet you can, she’s so great at depicting real objects, plus fantastical ones too. I’ll have to review the Doodle game here on the blog soon.

You can read about the Family Reunion game over here.

Stella is a game kind of like a sequel to Dixit. I enjoy it more though because the images on the cards aren’t so creepy looking. (I briefly review it halfway down over here.) We played two rounds and my teen daughter won both, with me in last place both times. Boohoo! Usually I do well at this game but I was not jiving it with that day. You basically have to try to read other people’s minds as they connect words to pictures.

-watching another family movie, The Fighting Preacher. A great true story of Willard Bean and his family who lived in Palmyra New York in the early 1900s. I definitely felt the Holy Spirit while watching this. This wasn’t part of the plan but as I let everyone pick a game, my teen son picked to watch this movie instead.

We also met with the out-of-the-nest children over Zoom to celebrate the wedding anniversary, also known as our family’s birthday, on Friday night, before the cabin trip. I showed baby pictures of family members and asked the kiddos to guess who-was-who. My firstborn, who lives in TX, surprised us by walking through the door 10 minutes before the Zoom meeting started. Wow! We had no idea he’d show up in person! That was so fun! I love surprises like that! He was in town for a wedding of a friend of his new wife. I’m sad we missed seeing her, but she was off having fun with her friends and family on the eve of the wedding of the family friend. I went to bed that night feeling so full of joy after seeing and talking with all of my children. Truly “children are a heritage of the Lord.” (Psalms 127:3) I’ve had a hard time with one of them but things have improved in the past six months.

We capped off the family birthday celebration on Sunday by attending church via livestream at the cabin, watching a Come Follow Me scripture study show at BYUTV called Come Follow Up, and then playing the game above with our two kiddos left at home. We then left the cabin for home and had pizza at home, including a keto pizza for my husband and me (again breaking the carnivore diet a bit in honor of a special celebration). Then I did a volunteer shift at my local Family History Center with my husband in tow. I helped an elderly man navigate familysearch.org and ancestry.com, looking for spouses of some deceased relatives. We didn’t find any, but I helped him find some other deceased relatives that he can do temple work for. That was so satisfying! I am feeling full of the family spirit! I love families and all the stories involved with them. 

The ways we have celebrated our anniversary has evolved over the years. When all the kids were under 12, we were doing well just to get a babysitter and go out for a dinner at a restaurant. Sometimes we did, and sometimes we just took the kiddos and had a family picnic. Honestly, I have no memory of how we celebrated some years when all my kids were under foot. As the children grew older, we could easily go out while the older kids who were teens babysat the littles. I finally figured out that it was important to me not to just go out for dinner, but to go to the temple and do sealing ceremonies as proxy work so I could hear my “vows” that I made 32 years ago on my wedding day. So that’s a mainstay now in the annual celebration.

One time, I decided that a business trip my husband had to take for work, which was paid for by his work, would count as our anniversary celebration. He had a two-night stay paid for at the Zermatt hotel in Midway, UT, so I went along with him. We had the kids join us for one night of swimming and s’mores, and then sent them home with a teen driver, while we had the second night to ourselves. This happened for a few years in a row. One year, two years ago, my oldest two children treated us to an all-expenses paid second honeymoon trip to Key West Florida. That was our big 30th year anniversary bash. You can go here if you want to see my tips for how to stay married for 30 years and see photos of our second honeymoon to Florida.

Some years I like to include a big outdoor activity for the family like Frisbee golf or a visit to the canyon. Some years I like to get a family birthday present, like an ice cream maker, or something else that the whole family will enjoy, even simple things like Frisbees for Frisbee golf. I haven’t always had the money to do that so when I don’t, I make do with what I have. The important thing is to do something that we both enjoy, to remember that we are in love and committed to each other. I hope this has given anyone out there ideas for celebrating wedding anniversaries.

I’m so grateful for my testimony of Jesus Christ and his ordinances available in temples to seal us as a couple together and our children to us for eternity. We’ve experienced joy and pain together, but the joy far outlasts the pain. I look forward to experiencing this joy eternally. My heart aches for anyone who doesn’t feel this joy of intact marriage and the joys of being able to raise children and see them connect with you as adults. I pray that all people the world will have any strained or broken relationships heal through the atoning grace of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior.