Twelve Years

I woke up that morning with an aching right achilles tendon, trying to figure out what I had done this time without realizing it. Almost tripped over myself getting out of bed, quickly realizing that putting any pressure on it was really going to be a bad idea.

Two hours later I was in the church nursery. Fortunately for my achilles tendon, there were only two kids in there, and one of them was Yali, who was clearly showing off big-time for the little girl with curly blonde hair and flower barrettes. How does he know to do that already?

It was our twelfth wedding anniversary. And since there was a lot going on in life those days, we figured we’d officially celebrate at a later time once things had settled down.

Meanwhile, I tried to stay off my healing achilles tendon by letting the boys visit an international festival in Tower Grove Park with the rest of the family, while Oxbear and I filled out an unnecessarily lengthy online application for our home loan before he left to finish more government-mandated repairs in our basement with Theodore before the final inspection Monday morning… This left me with about 90 minutes of absolute silence to myself. Amazing.

As the evening arrived, Oxbear and I decided to round out our twelve years by switching on a podcast and hitting up the grocery store together.

Oxbear’s right knee was beginning to plague him again after the move. We must have been quite a sight walking the aisles.

“Oh, come on. We can’t both be limping on the right leg. That just looks stupid.”

“Switch legs.”

“YOU switch legs.”

“I was injured first.”

“Were not.”

On that note of maturity befitting a couple married a dozen years, we returned to the Silverspoon’s. The sun had not yet set.

“Hey, it’s only 7:44. We know how to par-tay, my friend.”

“Do we?”

“Hey, listening to a John Krasinski podcast and buying a huge bag of banana popsicles for the boys… If that’s not partying, pal, I don’t know what is.”

Top that off with a few episodes of the “The Office”, and you’ve got a pretty decent not-celebrating-yet-but-sort-of anniversary.