1 Year, 2555 Oreos

Last week Tyler and I celebrated one year of being married. One thing I’ve noticed about a lot of my married friends is that they move a lot. They’re young, their jobs take them different places, and they’re not quite settled yet. Frequently I’ve seen couples posting about their anniversary on Instagram with a cute picture of them and a caption breaking their first year into numbers like “4 apartments, 3 states, 2 dogs, and 1 year of bliss!” Unfortunately, I am neither cutesy enough to write a caption like that nor do we have enough events in our lives going on. If I were to make a caption like this, it would read “1 state, 1 apartment, 1 year of marriage, and 2,555 Oreos.” (Yes, Tyler eats 7 double stuf Oreos every night. I had a friend once say, “Tyler..that’s the guy who eats the Oreos, right?” So yeah, he’s the Oreo guy. I know what you’re thinking: How did Nabisco choose Shaq to advertise Oreos over Tyler? Does Shaq even eat Oreos? When will this injustice be corrected? All are obviously questions that keep me up at night.) I decided this caption didn’t really include some of my favorite memories from our first year, so I’ve broken it up into a few more numbers:

50 fake Donald Trump tweets: My favorite website I discovered in this past year is a place where I can generate my own Donald Trump tweets. I send them to Tyler regularly and pretend they’re the real deal. This one I sent during my summer break in attempt to get Tyler to stay home with me: 

Luckily President Trump helps us settle some debates as well:

10 trips to Cafe Rio: There’s no secret that this is one of my favorite restaurants. What most people don’t know is that when we bring our leftovers home, I insist on labeling them if there’s a chance anyone else will eat them. 

3 trips to Rexburg: In the past year we’ve been able to take a few trips to Rexburg to see my family, one being the weekend before the 4th of July. I thought it would be perfect, because Rexburg was going to be having their big fireworks show while we were there. I use the word ‘big’ loosely, because the fireworks show is shorter and not as grand in comparison to other shows we’ve seen, but we still thought it would be a fun night out. My family spent the whole day trying to get Tyler to lower his expectations, since he hadn’t seen the Rexburg firework show before. “The firework show is much longer in Utah,” they warned him. “But it’s still fun to go.” My family and I went out to the park that evening and set out our blankets with the rest of the town, waiting for the show to start. We waited as the sky got dark. The fireworks never came. Some of the families with younger children gave up and went home. The fireworks never came. Some of the older families and teenagers packed up their things. THE FIREWORKS NEVER CAME. So yes, after a day of telling Tyler to lower his expectations, it was only fitting that we waited for hours in the dark until realizing they were canceled.   

8 Utah Jazz Giveaways: One thing we love doing together is watching the Utah Jazz. We always try to attend a couple games during the season, but something that is on our bucket list is to sit front row at one of the games. Luckily, the Jazz sometimes host Facebook giveaways for front row tickets, so we enter them. ALL of them. Not only do we both enter them, but after entering them we always pretend like we’re going to win, even though the chances are incredibly slim of actually winning. We remind each other we’ll need to leave work early the day of the game, we discuss having to cancel previously made plans, and every single time we don’t win we act surprised. “Maybe they forgot to call us, and our tickets are waiting at will call” we wonder, as we search for another contest to enter. 

3 Orange Chicken Attempts: Before getting married, dinners for me mainly consisted of quesadillas, spaghetti, and whatever my mom made the family for dinner the previous night. Once my parents moved further away from me (and my GoFundMe project to purchase a private jet so I could still use food from my parent’s pantry epically FAILED) and I got married, I decided to learn how to cook. One night I decided to try making orange chicken in the crock pot. I put the ingredients in the crock pot before going to work, came home to a delicious smelling apartment, sat down for dinner, and it was TERRIBLE. The chicken was so dry it was essentially like eating the Sahara Desert covered with orange sauce. We both pretended it was fine for a moment, but it was clear the next day after work when we both brought home our tupperware still full of orange chicken that we were supposed to eat during lunch how terrible that meal had been. I swore off orange chicken for months, promising Tyler I’d never make orange chicken again, and used it as a reference point for other meals. (On a scale from orange chicken to 10, how good was the new recipe we tried?) A few months later, I went over to my aunt’s house where she served a delectable orange chicken. Apparently I had temporary memory loss and forgotten the first orange chicken fiasco, so I asked for the recipe. I made it, telling Tyler, “If this turns out bad, I’m never cooking again.” We tried it. IT WAS STILL THE SAHARA DESERT OF CHICKEN. How was this possible? I promised Tyler again that I would never try making orange chicken for as long as I lived. A few months passed, and “Easiest orange chicken you’ll ever make!” and “Orange Chicken: If you can’t make this, you probably also got a D+ in your middle school cooking class for burning those pancakes” recipes started showing up on my Pinterest feed. So yes, I tried making it AGAIN. It actually turned out pretty good! (But don’t think I didn’t warn Tyler beforehand to order a pizza so it would arrive just minutes after the chicken destroyed our taste buds for the third time in a row.)

1 Cubs/Braves game: Over Labor Day, Tyler and I were able to visit Chicago to see my grandparents and go to a Cubs vs. Braves game, who are mine and Tyler’s favorite teams, respectively. The trip also included touristy places, like the Sears Tower, and the Art Institute, where half the time I stood in front of a painting in awe wondering how it’s possible for one person to be so talented, and the other half I stood thinking “That’s it? I could do that. I probably have done that. Don’t I have a painting exactly like this in my kindergarten portfolio? Did the artist copy me? Did the artist break into my home and underneath piles of random papers and childhood artifacts my mom has been asking me to sort through for the past 7 years that I’m too lazy to actually sort through find my masterpiece and submit it to the Art Institute?” I assume that’s what most people are wondering about when they’re looking thoughtfully at paintings. The trip also included deep dish pizza (which I have spent every day thinking about since, which is why I now know you can order deep dish pizza through Amazon), my grandpa asking us frequently who won the World Series last year in order to remind Tyler who the better team is, the Botanical Gardens, my Grandpa making sure he used his Cubs World Series mug whenever he sat across the table from Tyler at breakfast, and Millenium Park.

Definitely my favorite 2,555 Oreos ever.