Our First Anniversary

If you haven't read in another post, I started this blog before launching, and I've been mostly off socials for awhile, so I have some catching up to do on all the big events of the past year.

First up...our first anniversary! Since we are a COVID wedding couple that had to postpone multiple times as many of you know, we ended up having three wedding "dates" (one being just us and our pastor and his wife for military reasons, one being a small ceremony with family and some bridal party, and one being the big official one). 

All that being said, we have multiple dates, but we celebrate our anniversary on the date of our small ceremony- December 5, 2020. This is the date we started wearing our rings, we considered ourselves married, I started using my new last name, etc. 

For our first anniversary, we were still amidst the craziness of wedding planning for the big ceremony/reception. Despite that, we made sure to get away and celebrate together.

We started off by having our neighbors stop by to take our Christmas card pics.

We then headed to downtown Wilmington to walk the boardwalk, enjoy dinner, ice cream, and supposedly a carriage ride- but of course they were off that one day we went!

We stopped at The Pilot House for dinner.

 

And enjoyed eating in the heated tent!

Living where we do, we take advantage of all the seafood! This was an amazing crab dip we had as an appetizer.

Downtown Wilmington is so super cute. It's historic, quaint, on the water, and even has cobblestone streets.

While our wedding, and therefore anniversaries, were originally intended to be celebrated in May, we do love the festive Christmas spirit that goes along with celebrating our anniversaries now! It makes for a magical time of year.

We came home for gifts. We also opened up our first three advice cards that guests at my Vernon Hills bridal shower wrote! Our plan is to read three a year on each anniversary. 

As you can see, we had a quiet but special first anniversary before celebrating in January with everyone else. What a first year we had- apart for 6 months of it due to deployment, Shane's dad passing away, living in our new state with few connections, and so much more. Through it all, I'm so grateful to have Shane as my husband by my side.