Celebrating our third wedding anniversary

My regular readers (hello to all three of you) will already know that Neil and I celebrated our third wedding anniversary a couple of weeks ago. I've already blogged separately about a few of our anniversary celebrations, but we managed to fit loads in this year so I thought I'd write a post to summarise what else we got up to.

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We were determined to make the most of this anniversary as I was in the middle of my cancer diagnosis nightmare on our second wedding anniversary. I had an urgent MRI scan on the actual day of our anniversary last year so it wasn't going to be too difficult to improve on that! My parents kindly took us out for a meal in the evening as they'd accompanied me to the hospital in the afternoon, but that was definitely the only saving grace.

The weekend before our anniversary, we visited The Making of Harry Potter studio tour in Watford. I'd had a difficult couple of months and Neil had been insanely busy in work, so we both really needed this long-awaited weekend away. We had a great time and I blogged all about the studio tour here. After spending the whole afternoon at the studios, there was a conveniently placed TGI Fridays right next to our hotel so we had a lovely meal and cocktails there on the Saturday night. I think a good old Jack Daniel's burger might be on my 'favourite meal ever' shortlist!

We got back from Watford early Sunday afternoon and spent the rest of the day with Jessie as we'd missed her so much while we were away. We initially didn't have any plans for the bank holiday Monday, then Sophie and Bryan invited us over for a barbecue which fitted in perfectly with our plans for the long weekend. The sun was shining and we spent a relaxing few hours talking, laughing, eating, and drinking wine (and some fruit juice).

Bank holiday Monday came and went all too quickly, but luckily we both had a few more days off work. The day before our anniversary, we went for afternoon tea in one of my favourite places in the world - Pettigrew Tea Rooms. I can't believe it's been over three years since the first time I visited there on my hen weekend... I must have been about 25 times since then! As always, the food and service was amazing and it was the perfect way to continue our anniversary celebrations.

To make the day even better, we managed to get a family selfie after we got home from our afternoon tea! We'd been trying to get Jessie to pose for a photo with us for days and she wouldn't cooperate, so I've decided she must have wanted to give her humans a nice anniversary gift. Or perhaps she was just tired and couldn't be bothered to be stubborn on this occasion...

On the day of our anniversary itself, we exchanged cards and gifts when we woke up. As leather is the symbol for the third wedding anniversary, Neil bought me a pretty leather bracelet from Pandora. This grey bracelet has been on my wishlist for a while so he chose very well, as always.

After going out for an obligatory hot chocolate in the afternoon (well, hot chocolate for me and coffee for him), we took Jessie for her evening walk then got ready for our meal at Etc Penarth. We had a really special evening with exquisitely instagrammable food which I blogged about here. As it was a rare opportunity to get dressed up, I wore my new white dress (sale bargain from New Look!) and my perfectly matching New Look shoes and Kate Spade bag. Colour coordination makes me happy, just in case you didn't know that already.

When we got back home after our meal, we settled down with a drink and watched Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. We're slowly making our way through the films again after visiting the studios... the second one is arguably the weakest film but we couldn't possibly leave it out.

I think you'll agree that this year's anniversary beats last year's, hands down!