Weekend Project: Celebrating 29

Baby we're a work in progress

and our palette is still wet.

Better get a bigger canvas,

we ain't seen our best days yet...

Lyrics from "Making It Up As We Go" by Scott Campbell

This weekend my husband and I celebrated our 29th wedding anniversary. After all these years, we are kind of hit-and-miss on the gifts. Some years we go in together and get something that we both want for the house, some years we get each other real gifts, and other years we just enjoy a nice dinner and exchange cards.

This year we had agreed to skip the gifts, but I still wanted to do something special to commemorate the occasion. He sets the bar pretty high on the thoughtfulness index - he writes me love songs! (See lyrics above.)

In comparison, I was feeling pretty helpless - I can't write songs or poetry or anything like that... But then inspiration struck! And here is the gift that I made for my husband for our 29th wedding anniversary - a memory book:

I started with a pseudo-classic-leather-bound book-like box from Pier One Imports:

It could be a cigar case, couldn't it?

But I had something different in mind to fill it up! I got some clear labels (1 x 2 5/8 inch) that can be run through my computer printer and I printed up 29 of them with a collection of memories from our years together:

Then I affixed the labels to colorful lightweight cardstock tags - found in the scrapbooking section of my local Michael's store:

Finally, I tied a thin ribbon loop through each tag hole:

Voila! The perfect anniversary gift - a Memory Book! Guaranteed to lead to hours of happy reminiscing together...

What kind of memories did I include? Everything from:

• the smallest details like the song that was playing on the car radio as we drove home from our first date 31 years ago ("Longer Than" by Dan Fogelberg)

• to silly things like the license plate bingo cards he made up for us while we were driving from Florida to Illinois one time (his card included states like Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Alabama, etc. and my card included states like Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico, California, etc. - he won, go figure!)

• to embarrassing things like the time I made him take me to my first (and last) X-Rated movie - and then made him take me out of the theater 10 minutes after it started!

• to some of our hiking and camping and rock climbing adventures (one of which involved Africanized killer bees!)

• to our first home computer in the early 1980s - a Commodore Vic-20 with an amazing 5K of RAM !!

I can't think of a better way to celebrate an anniversary than by remembering the many moments that made up your years together... :)