love letters

Saturday will be my 11th wedding anniversary.
I love that.

And I love the man I married so much more now than I did eleven years ago. I think every year longer is a year deeper and sweeter. I cannot fathom my life without my husband and hope to never find out what that would be like.

I would love nothing more than to go celebrate in style - so long as dressing up was not required. But, this year’s budget is tighter than we’ve ever seen and celebrating “big” just won’t happen. Anniversary money? Probably in the gas tank. Or the refridgerator.

Besides, I have no baby sitter (so we can’t use the movie gift card that we got last Christmas) and to top it off, this is my husband’s last weekend in a long class an hour from home – 9am to 6pm on Saturday, 8am to 3pm on Sunday. Something about that doesn’t ring true for a carefree weekend.

In light of all those things, we decided to get creative.
We’ll be writing love letters to one another for anniversary presents.

And HE suggested it. We should actually be very good at this since we spent a year prior to our wedding living 3,000 miles apart with TWO visits during that time (granted, we had actually known each other for a very long time). We spent enormous amounts of paper and postage on each other and I won’t even tell you what our last phone bill looked like, after we were officially engaged…the earlier ones were bad enough! Nope, we didn’t have email and cell phones were not a common commodity "back then".

And while we may squeeze in a chance to go out for dinner inexpensively as a family, there won’t be filet mignon, I can assure you (but it sounds good, doesn’t it?!). Instead, the odds are very high that we’ll go to Chinese or Mexican soon, order sodas with the meal (with jalapeño cheese dip if it’s Mexican!) and call it an anniversary dinner. Truthfully? That’s okay with both of us. We don’t mind sharing it with the kids, either. After all, they are part of our family and when we got married, we became family to each other.


But, since tight times are everywhere at the moment, I want to ask you:

~What would you do for very inexpensive dates and gifts, etc?

~Tell me what you’d do for $5 or less, and/or tell me what you’d do for $10 or less.

Please leave a comment with your ideas!


Among my favorite ideas are sharing a dessert and latte; going to a bookstore and perusing the clearance items to see if something fun strikes both people as an interesting purchase--a game, a book, or who knows what. Either one could be done with those two budget restrictions and are things I like! Of course, neither of these will happen since taking three kids along changes the dynamics drastcially!