Tradition, Tradition

This Saturday marked five years of marriage for Josh and I!  I can hardly believe that we have already been married five years, but I guess we have 2 beautiful boys and 1 crazy cockapoo to prove it!  As we often remark, it has been a remarkable journey already...filled with lots of highs...and a couple of lows, but I feel so fortunate to have my best friend by my side through it all.
  As I'm sure you expect (at least from the post title), we have a few little anniversary traditions we have established that I thought might be fun to share.  And then after typing a whole post about them, I looked back in my archives and realized I had actually shared them with you last year (you can check that post out here if you're interested)!  BUT there are a couple of updates, so I figured I would share those with you instead...

Last year, I shared with you that I create a photo book each year as a way to formally document and preserve our year. In the age of digital photos with hard drive storage, I am glad I decided early in our marriage (year 2 to be exact) to start making photo books to document each year (or 2 in that first book's case).  Honestly, our first book was a little pathetic...about 20 pages of us in various places and some cute shots of Chipper as a puppy, but then Colton arrived...and the books got a lot longer and a lot cuter!  This year's book was 100 pages (the site's limit) and honestly may be one of my prized possessions.  I don't want to bash the old site I used for making these books, but I will tell you that this year I used My Publisher for the first time and was totally wowed by the quality of the book...not to mention the ease of designing it and the price (after redeeming a free extra pages offer, my book was only $35 before taxes!).
I tried to take a picture of the inside, but I'm afraid mine just don't do it justice...

I've seen other people do these books, but most do them at the end of the calendar year.  I kind of like that we do ours to document each year of our marriage instead.

Our other tradition involves another kind of book.  I found this "Anniversary Memories" book on the clearance shelf at Hallmark right before our first anniversary and decided to pick it up.  Last year I explained that while I didn't really like the look of the book, I did really enjoy the sentiment behind it.  I also reasoned it would be a pretty easy DIY project, so guess who finally got her act together this year and decided to DIY a similar book.
 I created this page (done in our wedding colors)

and figured each year we could print it out, fill it in, and then glue it into a plain scrapbook.  Much prettier, right?

And then since this was our five year anniversary, I figured now was a good time to shamelessly steal this idea that I'm sure you have seen on Pinterest.

I somehow convinced Josh to pose with me and our wedding picture and figure it will be a fun thing to repeat every five years!

As for our actual anniversary, we decided to play it pretty low-key considering our recent Richmond jaunt and a pretty big trip we have coming up to the Atlantis, BUT we did manage to get out for some drinks and a dinner sans the kiddos.  And, ya know, I often don't give my hometown enough credit because seriously how lucky are we that this was our view while we were out getting drinks?

And that doesn't even do it justice!  That's the Back Deck in case you're curious.  And from there we headed to 37 North, a new restaurant also on the water (kind of).  Both were fantastic!

So those are our little anniversary traditions.  What about you all?  Have anything fun you want to share?  I'm always looking for new things to try myself:)