Birthday Weekend

I had a great birthday weekend!

It began right after school on Friday when my parents showed up wearing these paper hats from their tour of the Blue Bell factory. They're funny!

They brought a few things with them. One was this oven that used to belong to my Grandma Bushman - possibly even her mother - my great Grandma Tanner. Nate was kind enough to help my dad get into my house and on the base without anyone being injured or anything destroyed.

Friday night I had a little BBQ with the Martins and Collette. Fun times!

Saturday morning, I went to one of my students' baseball games. It was a lot of fun. After that, I was a tour guide at the open house of our new church building. I really need to get a picture of that to put on here.

My parents took me out to lunch and we went and watched "How to Train your Dragon." It was really cute. I had my ping pong party after that and had a lot of fun. Don't ask me why I didn't take pictures. It just didn't happen! Yikes! We didn't end up doing a tournament. We did play "around the world" and had lots of fun chatting and playing the Wii. My parents brought Excite Truck racing! Yahoo!

My mom made biscuits and gravy for breakfast today. They stayed until after church. It's been a great birthday! This evening, I got to go to the dedication of our church building. What a great experience!

School Fun

I've had a few funny things at school as of late that I thought I'd better post about.

I often have "lunch bunch" with my students who save up 20 good behavior tickets. They get to bring a friend. I try to work it out so there are a few kids in the group. Since the weather's been so nice, we've been eating our lunches out in the atrium of the school. There's a swing out there that the kids love to play on after they're done eating.

This little game cracked me up. They kept switching positions and taking turns. It totally cracked me up that they were singing Little Bunny FooFoo (sp?).

Our first grade team donated an ice cream party to our PTA's fundraiser carnival's silent auction. We paid up this last week. Here are some of the kids whose parents won the bid along with a friend they each got to invite.

3 kids from my class got to attend. Abbey's mom won the bid and she invited Jordan. Jacob got invited by his cousin who's in another class.

After the ice cream, we took them out to play on the playground. We ended up playing red rover. Besides several of the kids getting clotheslined, it was a lot of fun. This is right at the end of the game. These two didn't stand a chance.

Believe it or not, this little one was the toughest competitor. She would growl the whole time she was running for their hands. She knocked down 2 teachers, on 2 separate occasions. We nicknamed her BC - Bulldozer Cooper.

We have a little turtle out in our atrium that 's been pretty elusive. One of our custodians found it and brought it around to show some of the teachers after school.

Thank goodness for Debbie who not only keeps our school clean, but takes care of the animal residents around the school.

Picture Perfect Day

Okay, these first two pictures are actually not on the same day as the rest, but they fit the theme, so I've included them!

Friday night was an open house for Becca and Chad. I ran into Joy Kong (recently married) and Brady & Jennifer there. It was fun to see everyone, even though I get to see Brady more often. It was fun to hang out in a different setting.

Becca and Chad have been married for a few years, but he got baptized a little over a year ago and they got sealed on Saturday. This picture is funny because they still have dirty faces from shoving cake at each other.

This is Saturday now, with my better camera too. This is just after they had come out of the temple after the sealing, which was amazing!

Here's their cute family! The kids weren't too happy with the photo session.

I thought they all looked so cute!

Even though it was slightly overcast, it was so bright out there! I was glad I had my sunglasses!

This is right after they were trying to get a picture kissing their kids on the cheeks.

As I was getting ready to leave the temple, I ran in to Bro. Mercado who was leaving as well. He used to work the Wednesday night shift with me at the temple. He's hilarious. He was using his cane as a guitar to pose for this picture.

Later on that day, Collette and I made a little trip to Brenham to see the wildflowers - Bluebonnets mostly. We found some awesome fields!

I liked this shot of Collette with the bluebonnets in the background.

This field was just off the road. People were pulled over right off the highway and there were tons of people there taking pictures.

They were pretty high. We found a good spot to fit right in there.

Too bad I look like a dork in all of my pictures!

I took A LOT of pictures. You're just getting small portion!

Since we were in Brenham, we made a stop by the Blue Bell factory.

We got there just as they were closing, but they did hand out some free ice cream sandwiches!

We saw this little field by the factory and had to get a few more pictures because this field had Indian Paintbrushes as well and the other field didn't.

Okay, I didn't actually take this one. My mom got this one of my dad yesterday at a cemetery. I thought he'd be making a silly face, but I think it's a nice picture of him! Good job, parents!

As if my day wasn't full enough yet, Collette and I continued the fun at the Crawfish festival in Old Town Spring.

It was definitely a cultural experience and there were TONS of people there. There were a lot of choices on what to eat. Anything sound good?

They had 3 live bands playing, and this Zydeco was my favorite I think. They had a country music one, and a rock and roll one.

Since neither Collette nor myself are huge fans of crawfish, we sampled some other great food. She got a turkey leg from the coolest food service guy we saw.

It was delicious. I got some chicken on a stick with fried rice - also great! We splurged and shared a fried snickers. It was SO GOOD! What a fun day!

Twins!

The other day at school I had two girls show up at class wearing just about the same outfit.

Both of their moms shop at Gymboree and they showed up wearing their new clothes on the same day. They were both wearing white bows in their hair. Even funnier was the fact that it was my two girls that currently have broken arms . . . and pink casts.

Bushman Fun

Today was a fun "Bushman" day. I went to Sacrament Meeting with the Humble Ward this morning because my cousin Dannen was blessing his youngest daughter, Bailey.

Later on today after church, they also had a birthday party for their oldest, Kyla, who turned 2 today. The first item of business was a pinata. All the little kids took some swings before the bigger kids got involved. Kyla had the first swing, but helped her dad with the rope after that.

Here's Mark with Kate taking her turn. I love Dannen's face in the background.

Here's the cute Washburn family. Daciana's pregnant and is still planning on running a half marathon in Utah in June! What a trooper!

After the pinata was dismembered the kids were wearing parts of it like hats. I was more amused when the guys started doing it too.

Here's Anthony trying on his lovely hat!

Kyla got her candles out in one blow. No boyfriends, whew!

Random candid of some great people!

Kyla's trying out the new little bubble maker I gave her for her birthday. She got a lot of clothes and a lot of bubble stuff. Glad she likes those things!

Here I am holding Bailey. Dannen wanted to try out my camera since they're thinking of getting one. I wish I would have taken one of her in her blessing dress. She looked so cute, but I was really loving this little mumu that the Hargroves had brought back from Hawaii for her.

Here's the group of "Bushmans" that were present. It's always a fun time! Love you guys!

Supercross

Saturday night was a fun one.

Collette was actually at my house Friday night. We had the TV on and saw that Supercross was in Houston on Saturday so we decided to go. We just showed up at the Reliant Stadium to get tickets the day of. Someone saw us and gave us 2 free tickets . . . CLOSE. This picture above was not zoomed in. We were on the first level.

It was just Collette, her cute cousin Marlies, and me. We had a great time. Since there were three of us and we were just given 2 tickets, we just purchased one and all sat down at the good seats. The event wasn't even close to sold out so there was space available.

Besides all the cool tricks from the motorcycles, they had some other fancy stuff going on. They had fireworks and some flame throwers! We could feel the heat!

They got SO high on this jump right in front of us. The first few times I saw them do it, I couldn't help but gasp.

Here's some actual video of them jumping at that spot. It was amazing and they were so fast! If you watch the bottom right hand corner at about 12 or 13 seconds into the video, you can see one guy wreck. . . if you like that sort of thing! :)

Marlies took this one of Collette and I on Collette's phone. Too mad it looks like I'm wearing a shade over my eyes! :)

I got his one of people coming across the finish line. There was a big jump there too. I kept worrying that they were going to hit their heads, but they never did!

While they were getting ready to have the finals in the races, they had these stunt guys come out and do some jumps. It was awesome. I have a few others videos after this of the same thing. It was all just so cool!

I sure enjoyed the show! I'm glad Collette's been around to introduce me to the monster truck thing as well as this. I've enjoyed both of them quite a lot!