Our 8th anniversary...oops!

We've been a little silent on the blogosphere since we've been home from vacation. This is probably because we came home, unpacked and essentially hit the ground running. We got home late on a Friday night, and then Saturday was spent unpacking and getting our house in order so that Sunday, we could host one of our favorite missionaries (Dan Iverson - Japan) who was preaching that Sunday and spending the night at our house. We probably should have let someone else in the church host him considering the circumstances, but we insisted on hosting him because we wanted the extra time with him...and we had a wonderful visit with him, as usual. Then our denomination's General Assembly was the following week, where all of the pastors and ruling elders in the PCA gathered in Dallas. Then the next week (THIS week), was our church's vacation Bible school (VBS), where I've had to get all 3 of my kiddos up to the church every day by 9:00a.m. and where I've been in charge of teaching the Bible story to the 3rd through 5th graders. It has been a lot of fun, but pretty exhausting as you can imagine.

This hectic pace from vacation until now is probably the reason why John and I both forgot our 8th anniversary yesterday!! What's funny is that yesterday morning, John turned on the computer and I asked him to check my email before I ran off to VBS. While he was pulling up my email, we both saw a notification from my facebook calendar that today was our anniversary! We simultaneously let out a slight gasp, looked at each other and said, "Uh...happy anniversary!" Where would we be without our facebook birthday/anniversary calendar?? Gotta love technology...

These are not our professional pics, but a couple of the only digital ones that I have from one of my bridesmaids. After John got home from a pretty busy day at work, we ate a normal dinner, got the kids in bed early and then spent the remainder of the evening reflecting on the last 8 years of our marriage - how MUCH has happened, how far we've come, and in what ways we need to grow. What's funny is that this isn't the first time we've forgotten our anniversary! Believe it or not, we BOTH forgot our 1st anniversary for the same reasons! We had just gotten back from vacation, John had just been installed as senior pastor at Trinity, we were in the process of packing, moving and, in the meantime, commuting from Dallas, and our anniversary fell on Father's Day, which is a Sunday...a day that John had to get up and preach. So it wasn't until one of my in laws came over to me and whispered, "Happy anniversary" that I nearly fell over. John said that he remembered right in the middle of his sermon. We always joked that it would be really easy for us to remember how many years we've been married since we got married in the year 2000. Now if we could only remember the date!

Here we are, walking happily down the aisle...finally able to relax and enjoy the moment! The pastors who married us (look behind us) were Peter Lillback and Michael Easley.

Here is our bridal party. My matron of honor was my sister, Melanie, and my bridesmaids were Hien Nguyen-Le (my best friend from college), Lillian Campbell (a dear friend who went home to be with the Lord a little over a year after this picture was taken), Lizabeth Swayne (a dear friend of mine from Proclamation PCA in Bryn Mawr, PA who is now with RUF), and Kim Starr (one of my neighbors with whom I became very good friends). John's best man was Joe Gage (his best friend from college and now one of the ruling elders in our church!), and his groomsmen were Mike Emlet (one of his roommates from Westminster and now a counselor with CCEF), Jake Yohannan (another great friend from seminary who became one of our church's associate pastors and has now gone on to plant a church in northern NJ), Claude Taylor (another great friend from seminary who is now the pastor of an OPC church in NJ), and Rick Shurtz (a great friend from Baylor U. who is now an assistant pastor at Gateway church in Austin, TX).