Five Years From First Date

Yesterday, July 8th, was the fifth year anniversary of mine and Lee-Anne's first date. We now have a wedding anniversary so we weren't sure if we were going to celebrate both. But five years is a nice and clean number so might as well.

We didn't do anything too unique, just revisited the place we had our first date, a bubble tea shop near the University of Waterloo. 

I have a blueberry milk bubble tea and she has a lyche one. On our first date I got mango and she had coconut with pineapple jellies. A chipmunk startled me by sticking its nose on my hand shortly after I took this photo.

I don't know if I've told this story on here, but five years ago I thought it would be crass to ask her out over Facebook, so I set up a time to meet and chat. After we'd had our drinks and had eaten our paninis, we were walking laps around the university as I steeled my nerves to ask her out. I finally popped the question, which surprised her as she thought we already were on one. 

Despite the second date being the first one where we were both knowingly dating, we count it from the July 8th bubble tea shop.

Whenever there's some kind of romantic occasion and we're lacking creativity, we get bubble tea. It is, I guess, our signature romantic beverage. Along with sunflowers it's pretty high up as a symbol for our relationship.

Speaking of sunflowers, I've had no luck with them this year. I planted a bunch that never came up. I planted a second batch and a bunch of sprouts grew that looked kind of right, but became increasingly disappointing as they slowly revealed themselves to just be weeds. In a final attempt, I bought a 12 pack of jiffy pots and put them on the window sill in our office, one of the few places the cats can't get to.

Eventually, exactly one sprouted. I don't know why it's been such a good year for vegetables but so bad for flowers. None of our wildflowers came in either, which I thought would be the easiest thing we did.

Yesterday I deemed the little sprout ready to be transplanted into the garden. I admit, it may have been ready a day or two earlier but the symbolism of planting it in celebration of five years together was too good to pass up. It was looking pretty strong today, having reoriented itself to face the sun. Hopefully it does okay when it has to deal with the tail end of Hurricane Beryl tonight. Hard introduction to the real world, little sunny.

In these past five years, we moved into where we're currently living. Her from her parents' place and me from my old bachelor's pad. She got her job at the CNIB. We got married. She's had prolonged stays in the hospital twice for observation of her epilepsy. One done over the skull, and one under.

A few days ago, Lee-Anne finally got the report for her intra-cranial examination. It turns out that she has insular, not left temporal epilepsy as she had been previously diagnosed.

This means they were able to pinpoint the location of her seizures as coming from the insula, a part of the brain set just beneath the left temporal lobe. Tomorrow, July 10th, a panel of doctors are going to come together and discuss potential treatment options. Then they'll schedule an appointment with us and we'll talk about steps forward. No clue what the timeline for that will look like, though.