. Segars Stories: One Year Later...

WE MADE IT!! We survived what has been called the hardest year of marriage (and for good reason!) Since we had just gone to Rochester as a sort of early anniversary trip and we’re going on our cruise in June we didn’t plan on doing anything grand on the actual day. John made reservations for a restaurant – where we were going was a surprise to me because I love surprises – and we exchanged gifts before we left. We also enjoyed a glass of wine from a bottle we’d bought on our honeymoon at a pineapple winery in Maui and saved for just this occasion.

The traditional first anniversary gift is paper, so we both incorporated that in our gifts (in addition to some others). John got me a beautiful potted hydrangea, the mug from Pittsford, and a poster that is basically a 32 picture summary of our first year of marriage. I love it! It’s a great tradition for us to start and it was all John’s idea!. He also made me a custom grocery shopping list with Charlie's picture as a background transparent image. This is sort of an inside thing between us I guess, but I put together our weekly menu and then need another column for the grocery items needed, so as he put it, it combines his need to give me a functional gift and my desire for organization! Haha :) Lastly, he printed out a homemade gift certificate good for a European vacation to anywhere of my choosing that we will take by the end of 2011!! I talk ALL the time about wanting to plan a vacation to Europe but have never really gotten the OK from John, so this was his way of saying he’s in!

To understand why I got John what I did, I should first explain that he has been very interested in getting his pilot license since we went on that helicopter ride on our honeymoon. Whenever he rents library books they’re usually pertaining to planes, pilot training, etc. Also, we live right beside a small local airport and he’s constantly scanning the skies to see if he sees anything coming or going. So for his gift I got him the book Flyboys (true story about WWII fighter pilots captured as POWs, written by James Bradley who wrote Flags of our Fathers) and a magazine about pilot training. I also got him 5 scratch-off lottery tickets (paper!) but he didn’t win anything L I guess we think alike because I had ALSO printed my own gift certificate to him, good for a 30 minute plane ride with a flight instructor the weekend of June 5^th. He loved it and I got the exact reaction I was hoping for :)

10 second timer before leaving for dinner :)

After gifts we went to dinner at Loccino’s, an Italian restaurant I had actually never heard of, but it was fantastic and we had fun talking about all the things we’d done and places we’d gone in that past year. Since our wedding, we’ve been to:

Maui and Kauai (Hawaii)
South Carolina
Royal Oak, Michigan and all around Detroit/Birmingham/Harrison Township/Ann Arbor/Auburn Hills
Leland & Traverse City Michigan (way up north)
Bellaire, Michigan (Torch Lake)
Long Island, NY
Mt. Laurel, NJ
Chicago, IL
Canada
Rochester, NY
Niagara Falls

We also talked about our strengths and areas of improvement (in a very loving way of course) and had a wonderful dinner. I can, and at the same time can’t, believe it’s been a year since our wedding and living in SC, but I know that despite some bumps in the road we’ve had far, far more happy times than not. I’m definitely looking forward to the rest of our lives together and all the memories we’ll make!