1710 The Five Year Anniversary

AKA: Why I’m the Greatest Wife

Saucy Scale: 10

For those of you who weren’t around for the days before I was Mrs. U, my hubby and I met right here in good old ODland.  

We were married on a beautiful sunny day in Chicago.  To be more accurate, we were married on Lake Michigan…on a boat.  It was the coolest wedding day ever! (Not that I’m partial or anything.)

Also, for those new to this…we honeymooned on the fabulous island of St. Barth.  This little tidbit will come in handy in a few minutes.

Thanks to the various leap years & alignment of the stars, our fifth anniversary landed again on a Saturday (just like our wedding day).  So, we booked another cruise on The Odyssey for our anniversary.  It happened to be the exact same cruise day/time as the one when we were married.  Only this time we got to sit back, relax and take in more of the cruise part.  Which was nice.

I even called the bakery that made our AMAZING wedding cake and had them make another cake for us.  It was a smaller (regular size) cake, but everything about the cake – yellow cake, lemon curd & raspberry filling, buttercream frosting was the same as our wedding cake.  I had it all planned out to pay to have the bakery delivery it to the boat, but TBU busted my surprise, so I saved the cash and we picked it up from the bakery after our cruise ended.

It was a great day, except my present for TBU hadn’t arrived yet!

According to "those in the know", the appropriate gifts for a Fifth Wedding Anniversary are:

Traditional – wood   (*insert great joke here*)

Modern – silverware

Here at The House of U, we like to shake things up a bit.  Apparently, The Fifth Year Anniversary is the St. Barths Anniversary!   

My hubby has an amazing talent for selecting meaningful gifts.  He remembers things that he’s heard and he can recall these factoids at gift purchasing moments.  It’s a great resource!  He remembered that I love Angela Moore bracelets and that one time I pointed out that she had a design named after St. Barth.  Guess what I got for our 5th Anniversary? 

I was trying to be sneaky with my gift selection!  We discovered (and consumed a great deal of) a wonderful vanilla rum made in St. Barth called La Pinta.  We brought back a bottle, but one of our overzealous friends drank almost the entire bottle one night (and if you think that didn’t piss me off a bit you’d be wrong!).  We’ve been hoarding the remains of the "honeymoon bottle" ever since. 

I thought TBU might enjoy a replacement bottle of our favorite rhum vanille.

I made a connection with a salesperson at the La Pinta store in St. Barth and was told that thanks to US Customs etc. they will no longer ship to the U.S.  I was really bummed.  (Go ahead, try to find a bottle here in the states…I bet you can’t.)  So, learning that I could never get him a bottle, I decided to just go ahead and tell him what I had hoped to give him for our anniversary. 

Turns out, he’d had the same idea and he’d already been turned down as well!  We enjoyed a giggle about the that fact.

A few minutes later I get an email from a woman who works for a company that represents St. Barth’s villas, hotels, & properties.  Her office is out of Boston.  She was about to take a trip to St. Barth on business and offered to bring back a bottle of my La Pinta for me!  I figured that this was the one shot I had at getting a bottle (unless we ever have the luck to head back to the islands ourselves), so I decided to GO FOR IT! and I asked if she would bring home the largest available bottle.  

I went thru some really quick calculations…

• The cost of the bottle was in Euros.
• Convert it to dollars (that was a suck for the old wallet!)
• Try to figure out the weight of the bottle for shipping purposes – and add some extra bucks as a buffer.

Email my MIL and ask if she would help me keep my surprise a secret…she mailed a check to my Boston Connection.  

The check was in the mail the next morning.

<p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left”>Turns out my Boston Connection couldn’t get the bottle back to the states, b/c she was only bringing carry-on luggage and feared that Customs would snag it.

However, she had co-workers making the trip a week later who were planning to bring checked luggage.  They could wrap it and stow it with their jammies in their luggage!

The downside was that the co-workers would be returning from St. Barth after our actual anniversary date.  I had to apologize to TBU that his present would be late.

This past weekend I found the long-awaited box of booze (she even mailed me my change!)had arrived at my dad’s house!!!

We’ll just say that he was more than a little impressed with my Yankee Ingenuity (and sneakiness!) and ability to pull off the impossible.  Not to forget…the fact that this bottle of rum is GIGANTIC!

Hehehehe! I was so excited that I’d pulled off this amazing gift-giving coup for my dear hubby!

We promptly opened our stash and enjoyed it the way we did five years ago on our favorite island…

Happy Anniversary, TBU.

So, that being said, I REALLY need to send a thank you present to my Boston Connection.  Any suggestions?  Because I’m stumped.  I know that I should have the perfect token thank you idea, but I just can’t seem to come up with the right gift.

Keep in mind, she’s a grown woman who gets to travel to St. Barth on business regularly.  Seems as if my Boston Connection might just have the coolest job ever!