Our third wedding anniversary has a special significance for us this year as the previous three years have been filled with an uncanny series of threes. We’re not superstitious but we are beginning to feel that three must be our lucky number.

The most outstanding threesome, of course, was our set of triplets who had arrived on the 3rd of March during our third year of marriage. Our three boys will be exactly three months old on our third wedding anniversary.

We live in Apartment #3 on the third floor of a typical three-bedroom big city apartment building, although we had never noticed any significance in that until recently. And I won’t even go into the three cribs, three car seats, three mobiles, three carriages, etc.

I was granted a three-month extension to the three-month maternity leave due me which was very nice of my law firm to allow, although I may not have a career left by the time I return. I’ve only been with the firm three years now.

I found the greatest idea for a 3rd anniversary gift for my husband and I to give each other for our third wedding anniversary - three original paintings of our children. I’ve always like pastels, especially for children’s portraits, and I’ve decided to commission a portrait of each one. A friend of mine gave me the website address of Paint Your Life, an online art gallery, and told me how pleased she had been with the results of an oil painting she had commissioned from them recently.

www.PaintYourLife.com is a very user-friendly website which made choosing and ordering the three pastel paintings very simple. There are lots of examples to give you ideas for paintings as gifts for all occasions. I uploaded three digital photos of the boys all taken of the three of them together, but with instructions regarding which pose to use of each of them for a separate painting. There was someone who confirmed that the photos I sent were suitable and posted separate photos for me to okay before they began work.

They have professional artists who painted the three pastel portraits, and I even got to view the finished results for each to approve before they shipped them to me. I choose matching frames for them and they arrived ready to hang.

Not only was my husband pleased with our third anniversary gift, but our family and friends were also delighted with the results. It’s clear that these paintings will become family heirlooms.

Wait until my two married sisters who live out of state see the paintings. I’d better send them the website www.PaintYourLife.com right now. That’s right, there are three of us…and we’ve each got three kids.