My 9th Wedding Anniversary

My husband has grown more romantic over the years.

As early as two months before our anniversary, which happen to be in the same month as the date that we first "met" and also the same month of our first date (on Valentine's), hubby has started dropping hints of what he bought for me.

Which honestly made me quite guilty as I haven't thought of a gift for him, nor did I thought of anything more than just a dinner for the two of us.  With kids these days, that's pretty hard to come by, I mean the dinner for two.  So, if I had thought of just a dinner for the two of us, that'd be a BIG thing indeed.

7th February.

Back in 1998, his final year of university and my 2nd year, I took that trip from Sheffield to Liverpool Lime Street station.  I remembered him wearing a long trench coat, with that rugged blue jeans and checked shirt waiting at the platform just where my train stopped.

That was the "first" time I met him.

14th February.

A week later he came over to Sheffield for our first date together.  There weren't many affordable restaurants there where we needn't have to pay through our nose for taxi fare or walk our socks out.  So we book ourselves a table at a very crowded Indian Restaurant in Broomhill.    

28th February.

In 2004, a leap year, we tied the knot.  The joke was he had the thoughts of wedding me on 29th instead so we can celebrate every other 4 years and save on the anniversary.

So when 7th February came around this year, I had thought that a wish and a kiss would do.

But hubby presented me with this...

A bouquet of roses in my favourite colors with a sweet romantic note. 

A surprise waiting for me in our bedroom after I came home from Vic's music class.

And the next day we had a nice, slow lunch at Genji Restaurant, PJ Hilton , admist the working lunch crowd.  Traffic was exceptionally bad that day, with many MNCs calling it a half day for Chinese celebrating CNY that long weekend.

The lobster roll was not available, but the waitress recommended this tiger prawn roll, which is simply glorious!  The prawn was deep fried, and still warm and crunchy as we sank our teeth in it.

My set of something something.

Hubby picked ala carte dishes... this is one of it. 

I didn't get to fully enjoy my roses this round as we left for the long CNY holiday two days later.  By the time we got home, it was all brown and dried.   I kept it in the vase for another week plus before deciding to put it away.

The bigger celebration was to be our wedding anniversary, and hubby taunt me almost every other day with hints on my next gift.  As if an expensive Ipad2 (to replace the 1st generation that I receive for our anniversary in 2011) was not enough, he bought me...

My first ever smartphone (yes, you heard me, I'm one of those aunties who is still using a dinosaur phone.  Even my mom is on smartphone!)...

... and it's an iPhone 5 32G!

So now you can find me on Viber, Line, WeChat, Kakao Talk, etc hahahaha

But I've not converted yet.  The iPhone is still a tablet to me, and I'm happy with my pink dinosaur still.

For our anniversary, we went for another Japanese lunch at Tao Japanese Restaurant the day before the actual day because it was a busy week for hubby and Thursday the actual day was a packed day for both ourselves.

It was such a value-for-money luncheon, as we kept ordering food after food.  We had scallops, abalone, blue mussels, salmon, oysters, lamb, octopus, etc on top of the usual fanfare.

Here are just SOME pictures of what we ate.  We ordered so much, ate so much (because you get billed for wastage) until our waiter took the liberty to order the final dish for us, WITHOUT us asking for it.  Haha.  Somehow, he knows we can eat, I guess.

Needless to say, we were the last guests to leave, also because we arrived after 1pm.  

And that night, we had our celebration together with the kids - the products of our marriage.  Haha.  Hubby had Secret Recipe custom made a American walnut chocolate cake.

Goes very well with Vanilla ice cream.

And my gift to hubby - bought just two days before our anniversary... a very thoughtful gift indeed...

To celebrate the times together... you're the perfect partner to travel this life journey with!