I warned him. I promise I did. We had only been dating a few short months and I had already fallen completely and head over heels in love with him. I started to get nervous. I knew it was time for us to have "the talk". "The talk" being the conversation when I explained to Daniel that the beautiful, smart, funny, loving, caring, kind (I could go on and on) girl that he had fallen in love with actually had...a flaw. My exact words to him were," I have bad luck. I mean really bad luck." He chuckled. I don't think he truly understood the seriousness of it all. I went on to explain. "My bad luck doesn't just affect me. It transfers through to the people I care about." I gave him a few example stories of my previous "mishaps" and I watched as his eyes got bigger and his jaw dropped. "Oh no!" I thought. "He is going to run. I just know it!" But he graciously explained that while my stories were rather funny and entertaining he truly didn't believe that I could actually bring him bad luck. Oh, but love is blind! And stupid.
Our first year anniversary- I will not go into all of the details, but somehow on our first anniversary we ended up having a miscommunication that led to the biggest argument of our entire relationship! We were so upset with eachother that we didn't even sleep in the same bed! We eventually sorted everything out and planned for a better two year anniversary. Our plan was to go on a cruise the following year.
Our second year anniversary- Our second year anniversary fell on a Sunday. It was Friday night and I had just gotten home from a hectic day of work and the plans were to start celebrating early by getting some half priced appetizers at our favorite restaurant. The reason we had to eat half priced appetizers was because we had just found out on Thursday night that we owed $3,000 in taxes! I pulled into our apartment after work and Daniel was there to greet me. He said, " I am just going to rotate your tires so that they wear more evenly." My response? " Daniel, you know our luck. Please don't mess up anything. I need my car for work on Monday." The reason Daniel had to rotate my tires was because I was in dire need of four new tires, but thanks to the good ol' IRS new tires were going to have to wait! A cruise was also going to have to wait until next year too. So I hesitantly left Daniel to rotate the tires while I went up to the apartment to get changed. I was gone for five minutes..tops! I came back down and Daniel looked like he was going to cry. I knew there was something majorly wrong! I asked him what happened. Daniel said, " I can't believe it! I am done! I am done trying! EVERYTHING goes wrong for us!" He looked so pitiful. I asked again, "what happened?" That is when the story came spilling out. He said that he used the jack that came with he car. When he started jacking the car up the jack shot straight out and the car came crashing down on the pavement landing on the plastic piece over the brakes! He thought for sure the plastic had cracked. So he retrieved the jack and tried again and this time the car fell again and almost landed on top of him! That is when I walked down the steps and found him looking so pitiful. So here we were with a car with 4 bad tires(one of the tires wasn't even on the car because the jack wouldn't work to put it back on), broke, hungry, and flustered. I walked away to leave him with the mess he made. The mess that I warned him not to make.
A few hours later he called his friend who had a decent jack and he put the tire back on exactly the way it was before. The whole fiasco could have been avoided if he just would have listened when I told him not to touch the car! Since we were both too skittish to drive the car too far we ended up going to Mickey D's since it was right down the road. We were Dollar "Menunaires" that night.
On Sunday the actual day of our two year anniversary I woke up feeling awful! I had a terrible cold, but I was determined to not let it ruin our day! So we went to church and then we went to Olive Garden for our anniversary lunch. Daniel ordered the "mixed grill" thanks to my advice. All day Daniel kept saying that the "mixed grill" didn't agree with his stomach. Later that afternoon I really felt awful so Daniel took me to CVS to stock up on every cough drop, cough syrup, and nasal decongestant we could find! I also left the store with a "Netti" pot. Here I am supposed to be celebrating my two year wedding anniversary in a tropical climate like we had planned, but instead I am spending it pouring a disgusting salt solvent down my nose in hopes that I can breathe! So not how I envisioned spending my anniversary! The best part was when it kept going down my throat instead of out of my other nostril and then Daniel had to demonstrate how to use it! I don't know about you, but a Netti pot demonstration surely doesn't scream romance!
As the day wore on it was apparent that I was definitely not going to be feeling better any time soon so we went to bed early. Prior to going to bed I had taken several different cold medicines. As I was lying in bed I realized that the room had started to spin and I started shaking uncontrollably. I felt like I was dying. I stood up and almost fainted so I crawled on the floor to our balcony and opened the sliding door. I layed my head outside on our balcony for some fresh air and realized that I was losing all of my motor skills. I felt so sick to my stomach. Obviously my meds had interacted. I started crawling at a turtle's pace to the bathroom. As I was crawling I heard Daniel jump up out of bed, pass me like the hare, and run to the bathroom. I couldn't believe it! Here I was dying and Daniel just runs passed me!
Then I heard it. Daniel was throwing up! What in the world?! So I crawled to the guest room bathroom all the way at the opposite side of the house. While I was over there I also grabbed a washcloth out of the linen closet and held it up to the faucet and then crawled all the way back to the bathroom that Daniel was in. I gave him the washcloth for his head. In between his puking he got these words out:"next year. we are. going. on a cruise." As we held hands sitting on the bathroom floor both sick as dogs I thought to myself,"somehow in the past 72 hours we have actually lived through all of our wedding vows." "For better or for worse, for richer or poorer, and in sickness or in health." Daniel gave me a weak smile and said "Happy Anniversary." In that moment I realized that although we were holding hands on the bathroom floor and we weren't sitting on a beach somwehere listening to the ocean with our toes in the sand it really didn't matter. We were together and in love. Just as in love as we would be anywhere else. And next year we would truly appreciate an amazing anniversary trip. The next day we both had to call off work so we spent Monday snuggling on the couch eating chicken noodle soup and watching cartoons.
Our third year annivesrary- This year we actually got money back on our taxes! So there was nothing coming in between us and our cruise! We scheduled our cruise for the exact day of our anniversary. Our cruise destinations were Nassua Bahamas, Freeport Bahamas, and then to Key West, Florida.
We were finally on our anniversary/ honeymoon that we never got to have! We were like kids in a candy store on that ship!
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| Relaxing by the pool |
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| Daniel trying out the waterslide |
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| Daniel even participated in a trivia game! I was so proud of him! He won a medal! |
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| Write your own caption... |
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Personally my favorite part of the cruise was the food! |
It was the second day of our cruise and it was time for us to spend the day at Nassau. We disembarked from the ship and headed out for a day of adventures. We caught a cab to the beach.
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| We checked out the aquarium at the Atlantis Resort |
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We swam in the crystal clear water |
We hopped on a cab and we were off! Now once we were in the cab Daniel started noticing some interesting details. Since he is a police officer he is always tuned in to what is going on around him while I am completely oblivious. He noticed that the cab driver had a sign that said "Peanut's taxi" inside the cab. He also had a dvd player mounted to the dash playing a black and white cartoon movie. His van kept stalling out when we went over a hill and he had to touch wires to honk the horn! Daniel also heard "Peanut" talking about how he was going home to put a new roof on his house.
Once he dropped us off we started walking back to the ship. We stopped by a few vendors on the way back through and just as we got back to the ship Daniel suggested we take a picture of the ship. I dug around my bag to find my camera. But to my horror...the camera was gone!! The camera we had been using we actually had borrowed from my mom. It had all of the pictures from our trip and we started to panic when we realized it was gone! I automatically blamed Daniel and he felt terrible. We retraced our steps and then finally remembered that we had taken a picture just before we left the beach. The camera had to be in Peanut's taxi! But where was Peanut?! Anyone who has ever been to Nassua knows what a chaotic mess it is. Taxis are everywhere and they all look the same! Except for Peanut's taxi...his just happened to be maroon! So we went to the taxi station and told the dispatcher that we needed to find Peanut. He had no idea who "Peanut" was until we described that he had a maroon van with a black and white dvd player. But he didn't have Peanut's cell phone and no one had seen him. So we waited for 2 hours hoping to see Peanut. The dispatcher told us that our best bet would be to get another taxi and go back to the beach and look for Peanut. So that is what we did. We went back to the beach and waited again and still no Peanut. We asked around and one of the other cabbies told us that he knew Peanut. This cabby looked sketchy! He told us he knew where Peanut lived and he would take us to his house if we paid him thirty dollars. Me being the bargainer I am tried to talk him down to twenty dollars, but he started to drive off so I shouted,"Okay we will pay thirty!" He slammed on the brakes and I hopped in the back with a bunch of spring-breakers and Dan took shot-gun. The cab driver dropped the spring-breakers off by the ship and started taking us to see "Peanut". As we drove farther and farther from the downtown and into the slums of Nassua I saw Daniel sizing up the cab driver in the front seat to see if he could fight him if necessary! We were literally passing by houses that looked like they had been burned down, but people were still living in them! I remembered thinking," We are so stupid! He is totally going to steal our money then beat us and leave us for dead! We are going to DIE on our third anniversary and I thought last year was bad! Someone probably already stole the camera anyway!"
After what seemed like an hour we finally pulled up to a very modest home. There were mangy dogs running around everywhere and then I looked up and couldn't believe my eyes. There was Peanut standing on the roof!! Our cab driver told him that we left the camera in his van and Peanut said "no camera." Daniel jumped out of our cab and ran to the van with the dogs at his ankles and there was the camera on the seat right where we left it! We were his last run of the day. Had someone else been in there after us it definitely would have been stolen! Thank goodness Peanut decided to only work a half day and go home and put a new roof on his house!!
This is the first time I am making this confession. Daniel, if you are reading this I am so sorry for blaming you. I am the one that actually left the camera in the taxi. I just couldn't admit that I had gotten us into another fine mess! I feel so much better now that this is off of my chest! Please forgive me...perhaps you could even laugh about it now? Or not. That's fine too.
We made it back to the ship and we FINALLY got to take this picture:
Looking back on all of the ups and downs of our anniversaries I am so thankful that whether we are on the beach in Nassau, on the bathroom floor of our apartment as sick as a dog, or in a sketchy cab in the slums of Nassua we are always in it together. There is no one else in this world I would rather go through these adventures with and I am so thankful that he didn't run when I tried to warn him.
That being said, I can't help but wonder. What will our fourth year anniversary bring??
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