Ten Years

We are back from our cruise and our busy summer is officially at an end. We've had a few North Family Milestones since my last, including Espen's first day of pre-school and our 10th wedding anniversary. Ten years! How did that happen?

We decided very early on in our marriage that we wanted to really celebrate our anniversaries, and seeing as we both like to travel, we decided that an annual trip would be the way to do it. It didn't always have to be big or expensive or even very far, we just knew that we wanted to escape the everyday and spend a little time away, just the two of us. And so far we have done a pretty good job of managing just that! Some of our anniversaries have been in faraway places (Venice!) and some of them have been a couple of hours away (Cedar City!), but what they do have in common is that they have all been such happy occasions, as well as a perfect opportunity to stop the world and remind ourselves that we are still the people we fell in love with years ago.

2005: Married for about six hours and seriously happy about life. 

2006: First anniversary in our first apartment!
And then a day or two later, we hopped on a plane to spend a few weeks in England and Norway.

2007: We don't have any of our own photos of this trip, (so I borrowed one from Tripadvisor) but for our third anniversary we ventured north and stayed at the Providence Inn near Logan, UT. We slept in, wandered around the town, went swimming and just generally enjoyed a long weekend together. 

2008: Utah Shakespeare Festival. We watched lots of plays, stayed in a seriously cute B&B and fell deeply in love with baked brie and each other.

2009: This year we combined our anniversary trip with a babymoon to Stockholm! Sadly, most of those photos disappeared in The Great Photo Loss of 2010, so we will have to make do with a pregnant photo of me in Gamla Stan.
 I promise Nick came too!

2010: Back in 2010 we didn't post our every move on social media, so we actually don't have any pictures of our fifth anniversary trip. But we do have this picture of Espen swimming with Grandpa, which is how he spent his weekend while we went back to the same place we stayed in when we got married. 

2011: Nick's beautiful Grandma Jo passed away just before our actual anniversary, so we replaced our plans for an anniversary trip to Las Vegas with a visit to Las Vegas for her funeral instead. Life got very crazy for us that fall, but we managed to sneak off for a few days after Christmas, just the two of us, and went hiking in Zion National Park (and stayed in a posh-ish hotel).

2012:Six months pregnant with Gwen and enjoying a quick break in St. George while Grandma and Grandpa took care of Espen. The heat was ridiculous, but we enjoyed tasty food, a show at the Tuacahn theatre and spending time together.

2013: Our babysitter cancelled last minute, so we scaled back our plans and made our eighth anniversary a family affair.
(A friend offered to watch the kids for us that night, so we did manage to sneak off to dinner and a moonlit ski-lift ride in the mountains, so no harm done.)

2014: Our anniversary was also Espen's first day of preschool, so celebrations were low-key.

2014: But we did celebrate a month earlier with a trip to Venice, so romance was not dead.

2015: Ten years! We went on a cruise to Alaska and celebrated the actual day canoeing across a lake near Ketchikan.

2015: Back onboard the cruise ship, we celebrated again with a fancy dinner and eversoverymuchtoomuch dessert.

Happy anniversary to us! I can wait to see where the next ten years take us.