Okay, okay, I say this most years. But this one… I can’t BELIEVE our last anniversary was 19 years and it’ll be TWENTY in 2024. In my head, we’re still those young kids that set out on the adventure of a lifetime we had no idea we were in for. I’ve gone on and on about how awesome it’s been, blah, blah, blah, pretty much every anniversary, at least for the last few years.

So. For our twentieth, I want to do something special. So I came up with something very me to do.

If you know me at all, you know just how much I love my lists. I have lists for everything. Grocery lists, Target lists, lists of things to do, lists of goals for the day, week, month, year…

Matt rolls his eyes at me. But whatever. I don’t know, it makes me feel better to check those little boxes, and seeing that line go through the words is somehow ridiculously satisfying.

I also like making lists to celebrate special occasions. Or at least to have some ideas of what I want to do to commemorate big things.

You see, my senior year of high school, for our final exam,my religion (yes, I went to Catholic school) teacher had us write a list of 100 things to do before we died. I guess they’re called bucket lists now, but that term hadn’t been coined 25+ years ago.

I’ve looked at that list fondly over the years. Yes, I still have it. Yes, I still occasionally check things off of it. Life is different than I ever imagined it now, and I don’t exactly have the same goals that I did when I was seventeen, but it’s still fun to occasionally pull it out and see how I’m doing.

I’m not even sure it matters if I ever finish all the things on the list. It gives me an awesome reminder of who I was, where I came from, and what my dreams were back then.

As I’ve mentioned before, I made Matt promise me we would go somewhere for every wedding anniversary. We have. And I have a list for that too. Good thing, because at this point I can’t remember all the things we’ve done.

Today (I originally wrote this Nov. 7th) marks the first day of our 20th year of marriage. I wanted to do something a little different, but oh-so-similar to something I did for my 40th birthday…

So I (okay, we, Matt rolling his eyes at me the whole time) made a list of 20 things to do together this year to commemorate our big anniversary. It’s got big things and little things, and by the time this blog post (or at least the list itself post) gets published, it’ll have different things.

We’ve already gotten started on some of the things. Stay tuned for the post with the list itself, and then for all the stories of all the things….