Marking Milestones

Recently we passed the 2 month mark with Shifu! It's hard to believe he's only been with us for 2 months, it seems likes he's always been around. Maybe that's because he acts more and more like Jasper every day. It's hard to imagine 2 dogs that could have less in common, size and breed wise, and yet the personalities and actions are eerily similar. But beyond that, he just makes us laugh every day. He doesn't walk through the house, he bounces and flies. He gets these bursts of energy and just runs around like his butt is on fire.

A couple of other milestones to mention - 8 months since Jasper died. It still feels like yesterday.

That also makes it 8 months since our 25th anniversary. I don't expect anybody to understand my feelings on this and in the scope of all that was happening 8 months ago this is a very unimportant thing but it still hurts that life conspired against my anniversary celebration. I had been looking forward to July 2011 for years, I had been planning the perfect celebration for at least 3 years. Of course the definition of "the perfect celebration" changed over the years, partly because of my changing ideas and partly because resources changed. At first I wanted to take a few people on a cruise, then it was just going to be the 2 of us on a cruise on the Queen Mary 2 (we had that one booked and it was going to be fabulous), then we were going to have a party at a favorite inn in California where Jasper would have been able to join us...guess it's good that one didn't work out. Then I thought we were going to be living in Florida so we finally settled on a very small dinner party at a favorite restaurant at Disney World. It was hard to select just a few guests (very small private dining room,) there were so many more I would love to have invited, but we got it done and had a wonderful meeting with the chef and the pastry chef. We got to custom design an amazing cake and I was so excited about it. The pastry chef was inspired by my ideas and promised that it would be a masterpiece.

Since all of our guests were traveling to Florida for the party, the theme was travel and here was one of the inspiration pictures for the cake



I love vintage luggage

Our cake would have been 2 suitcases with a round hatbox on top. I spent hours scanning old travel stickers for the tops and sides. This was my favorite


A great place for afternoon tea or to try a Singapore Sling

I also put all of my (non-existent) crafting skills to work and came up with a couple of favor ideas that I was really proud of.  Here was the monogram I created to go on all the various favors.

And my very favorite part - I had just finished ordering personalized M&Ms with our picture and monogram in my favorite colors of turquoise, pink and lavender when I got the call that I had to come back to California because Jasper was sick (I was already in Florida getting ready for the party) and we would have to cancel everything. Luckily the M&M people were wonderful when I called and they canceled everything with no charge. Wish I could say the same for everyone else. ;-)

The thing I really didn't want was for our 25th anniversary to slip by with no particular celebration because once it's gone, that moment can never be recreated.  Guess you could call that rather ironic, wouldn't you say?

I'm sure there will be other parties so don't be surprised if that suitcase cake makes an appearance.  The favors I created are sitting in a box in Florida in a corner somewhere so they might be used again.  Hey, it's only 4 more years till our 30th.