Life as the Youngest Senior Citizen: Celebrating Our First Anniversary with Obscene Amounts of Movies and Food

Jack: What's the traditional first anniversary gift?

Karen: Oh, let me try to remember. Uh... For my first anniversary, I got... a million dollars in cash... Paper! It's paper.

I'm just going to say it. The first year of married life is easy. You spend so much of your time celebrating throughout the year that it's like your birthday or New Year's Eve every day. People care about your relationship and say wonderful things about it every time they see you.

We celebrated our first anniversary last month with a weekend alone in the Chicago. Looking back I think it's a perfect way to start Year Two. It's no longer about having other people celebrate your relationship, it's now our job. And celebrate we did. Since the traditional first anniversary gift is paper, and Bryan refused to give me a million dollars in cash, we decided to give each other movie tickets, anniversary cards, a book of pictures from our first year together, and a piece of paper with a list of the five places we want to travel to next.

The day we got married we went out to breakfast and then went to the movies (we saw Whiplash). Every January it's my goal to see all the Academy Award Best Picture nominees. I love that our anniversary weekend falls right in the middle of award season because we'll get to watch great movies together every year. We still have one more movie to watch, but I plan to write a post just with my thoughts from the eight films soon.

Read on to see how we celebrated our first year together and what four things I learned along the way. Fair warning for all those who are hungry before reading this next part. There are a lot of food pictures. If you're one of those people (like me) who needs to eat before they go to the grocery store so they don't buy everything in site, you might need to grab a snack before you continue.

Got your apple? Okay, let's continue.

1. Love means never having to say we don't have time to watch six movies in one weekend:

Seriously, I'll have more to write about all the movies we saw, but the major highlight from this part of the weekend was that I cried at some point during every movie and learned that Bryan has NEVER CRIED AT A MOVIE. You never stop learning things about the person you married.

Horrible picture, but here we are during Day One of the Oscar marathon. We might be the only people who pick a hotel based on how close it is to a movie theater.

2. Your anniversary dinner is just another time to say, "I do."

Do you want to order that? "I do." Do you want some more sushi? "I do." Do you want to order enough food for our table, that table, and the other table over there even though it's just the two of us? "I do." We enjoyed an amazing dinner at Sunda in Chicago, which is described as Creative Asian Fusion. I think it's important to select a restaurant that can also be used to describe yourself. It was the best meal I've ever had.

Crispy brussels sprouts salad

Escolar "The Great White" - escolar, truffle shavings, and potato chip

Oxtail pot stickers

Lobster and wagyu

Spicy "Tail of Two Tunas"

Street corn - grilled corn, sambal coconut cream, toasted coconut, pandan leaves. Full disclosure - I ate five out of the six of these.

3. Sometimes you can celebrate like you're on a gameshow. Other times you can just order yourself a drink at the bar and call it a night.

Last year when we got married we may have gone to Binny's and shopped in a Supermarket-Sweep-everything-is-free-(it wasn't)-because-we-got-married kind of way. This year we decided to tone it down and hit up one of our new favorite spots for cocktails to toast the end of Year One and beginning of Year Two.

The Typical Cat at Sable is delicious. It tastes like a refreshing lemon/lime-ade. You forget there was alcohol in it until you have to get up and remember how to walk back to the hotel.

4. When you're not in Rome and still craving Italian - go to Eataly.

After walking outside our hotel we discovered that we were staying very close to Eataly. We spent the last day in Chicago roaming around the store looking at all the different food, books, and wine. I was a little confused how the store was set up because there seemed to be tables every where, but I didn't know if we could just sit down or if we needed to see a host somewhere. Was it one host for the whole place? Or did different sections have different rules for that? Tough questions to answer when you're starving with food all around you, but you can't eat it. Now I know how Dumbledore felt that time when he and Harry were in that cave and he was so thirsty, but he couldn't drink because the water kept disappearing. Like our Hogwarts heroes, (spoiler alert) we too found our way to what we needed. We asked for a table at one of the host stands. No inferi fighting required.

I could totally eat all that. That would actually be a fun game to play at Eataly. Look at the food displays and see how much you could eat of it. 10 points if you can eat it all. 5 points for half. And -2 points for none of it. Any negative scores in your group will help weed out the people you don't need to be friends with anymore.