This year, my wife and I celebrated our anniversary two days early with a night out (just the two of us) at Colorado Fondue Company. That’s the perfect restaurant when you want to just slow down and spend time together. The boys love it, too, and weren’t too happy about being left behind.

Yesterday was the actual day of our anniversary, but since we’d already celebrated and are both facing deadlines and work issues, we didn’t have too much planned.

They boys, however, had a different idea.

While I was upstairs working, they were downstairs, convincing my wife to turn our anniversary dinner into Something Special. She was already working on a nice dinner (chili-fish followed by homemade meringues), but they decided it also had to be Romantic.

They called me for dinner and I came downstairs to find our back porch table transformed into a romantic dinner for four. Fine china had been laid on colorful cloth place mats, and candles stood at the table’ s center,  lighting the darkness with a flickering glow. A champagne glass of clear water accompanied each place setting, along with a tall frosty root beer float.

“Wow,” I said.

Between the candles, my oldest son had placed some roses from our garden in a glass salad dressing bottle. Red rose petals lay around its base, forming the shape of a blooming rose.

“I did that,” my youngest son said.

“Cool,” I said.

It was, though, kind of dark and a little cold. While they put the finishing touches on the meal, I quickly built a fire in the chimanea. For once, my fire-building skills didn’t fail me, and in no time the crackling of a fire joined the peeping and singing of Florida’s ever-present frogs and crickets.

We all sat down and raised our root beer floats for a toast.

“Wait,” my oldest son said. “Not quite ready.”

He ran to hit a couple switches. As “Marry You”, by Bruno Mars, started playing on his boom box, his disco ball sprang to life, throwing colored spots all over the inside of the porch.

“Happy Anniversary!” he said.

Yep. It really was.