To my husband...

The eighth anniversary isn't really a "big" one; it's not as exciting as the first or as impressive as the fiftieth. But it is another year, another occasion to remember God's faithfulness to us as a couple and His blessings on our family as it's grown. 

In the decade since we started dating, we've traveled the world, lived on three continents and welcomed four new lives into our family. 

Summer 2003 - we started dating

I love him so much I married him twice - first in Canada and (this photo) in Brazil. 

We have shared so much in the past years; joys and sorrows, laughter and tears, ups and downs. And through it all I feel so blessed to have had you by my side.

Travel is so much easier without kids (well, with one it's pretty easy...)

We've had a lot of adventures, the biggest one, of course, becoming parents. We do make pretty cute babies, if I say so myself.

I can't wait to see what our future holds. 

Love you honey,

Your wife

April Fools

David and I have a long history of pulling some pretty awesome April Fools jokes on our family and friends. Our biggest and most wide-spread prank was our "spur of the moment" wedding that we staged in 2004. We'd been dating for about 10 months and were well on our way to an engagement. We were both at University in Canada and far away from our parents. Mine were in Bangladesh and his in Brazil. Since we hadn't yet met each other's parents, we thought it'd be fun to convince them we'd gotten hitched.

This resulted in a $35 Value Village dress for me (which I later exchanged for some wearable clothes) and David in a suit. We strode through our college campus and snapped some shots by the blossoming Cherry trees. Of course, we had to do this on March 31 as my parents were already 12 hours ahead of us, and we had to be sure they'd get the email on April 1st and no later!

I don't think we really fooled my mom, but I did get an email back from her with the subject, "congratulations" and an empty message. We did fool a lot of our friends and some complained about having to return gifts!

And I wore a white lace table-runner as a veil - this (and the dress) were what convinced my mom we were just joking.

We were engaged on July 30, 2004 and married in June 2005.

Our other big prank has come around full circle. In 2010, when I was pregnant with Elena, David made an interesting Facebook update which resulted in quite a few people thinking we were having twins...

Just one little letter made all the difference in this status update...

I had a good laugh with my friend Ana on Skype Chat - just love the line, "with you two - i should have expected"

If you have any doubt that God has a sense of humor, just look where we are now, expecting twins in about two months! If we were to pull a prank today, it would go something like,

"Well, the ultrasound techs were wrong! Logan and Liam will be arriving in May.:)"

Would you fall for it?