Charlie!

School Visit

Every once and awhile Susannah and I will get a visit from Adam or Abraham during school. The kids love having visitors. We got a nice visit the other day from both of them. The kids couldn't keep them straight since they both have A names, I guess. They sure don't look alike!

Here they are bored as my kids are lining up for lunch. They riled the kids all up and then I had to get them quiet again to go into the hallway.

I got a class picture with them, and true to form, they made their annoying picture faces.

I found a new trick, though. I snapped a picture of them right after the initial picture when they're laughing at themselves for how clever they were to make faces in the picture. Ha!

The Hills Are Alive . . .

One of our friends attends San Jacinto College Central in Pasedena, Texas. She (Stacy) is in the music/theatre program. Last weekend we attended a play they did of The Sound of Music.

Stacy played a nun obviously. More specifically, she was Sister Margaretta (for you Sound of Music enthusiasts). I snapped this picture right before the play started.

They didn't say there wasn't supposed to be photography during the performance, so I just turned off the flash and snapped this one of some of the nuns. Stacy's the one on the left. She did wonderfully on her singing parts. I also really like the girls' voices that played Maria and Leisl.

We actually had a pretty good turn-out. There were several from our FHE group, ward, and even Aunt Maylene, Uncle Darrell, and Lance came! It was a fun group.

I had to stick this video on there. This was during our family's Hawaii trip in December of 2004. Many years ago in Hawaii, my parents were hiking Haleakala crater on Maui with a bunch of boys. My dad was a coordinator for a program that sent teenage boys to Hawaii to pick pineapple during the summer. Anyway, on this hike, when they neared the top, my dad busts out singing "The Hills Are Alive . . . " in his best soprano range (which is pretty good). It's been entertaining to the family ever since then. Since we were visiting Maui again, it seemed appropriate to have him sing it. We added our own theatric elements and Susannah cut and edited everything together with the sound and all to make what you see here. I was too lazy to to try to get that chunk of video uploaded somehow, so I just played it on the DVD player and videoed it with my little Cannon PowerShot. That could explain the quality.

Jee Soo Choi

Eighteen years ago today, my little brother, Adam joined our family. He was born in South Korea. When he was 6 months old, the adoption agency flew him over to us. His Korean name was Jee Soo Choi. My parents wanted an Adam, so his name was changed to Adam Jee Soo Bushman.

I was looking through my pictures and realized I didn't have any of his baby pictures! Oops! I guess I didn't really get the photo bug until a little later. I love these early pictures of him, though. He was a good little poser.

1995 was a momentous year. Adam graduated from kindergarten, Susannah graduated from 8th grade, and I graduated from high school. Here we are at his kindergarten graduation in Joseph City.

I just had to put this one in for contrast. This is his high school graduation last June (07).

This one's just fun.

This is my most recent picture of him. I saw him in January when I flew out to Utah for a wedding. He's attending BYU and loving it. We love Adam and are so blessed to have him our family!

Bienvenido a casa!

Our cousin Lance got home from his mission to Argentina today! Yahoo!

We walked in to his parents' house after school and this is how he greeted us. It was pretty funny. He looks thinner, more mature, and a little bit like another cousin named Brent (we think so, anyway).

We made him let us take pictures of him. I liked this one with his scripture covers. They're pretty nice!

After dinner, we took a picture of the family members that were currently home right before Lance went to report to the Stake Presidency and get released as a missionary.

Skype

For awhile now, Susannah and I have talking to our parents every week via computer using a program called Skype. It's really quite fun and it's great because it's free!

Up until last Sunday, it's always been just audio. The web cams for Macs are expensive so we haven't gotten one yet. My parents have both Mac and PC, and they have a camera for the PC. The only problem is, it doesn't have a microphone to pick up sound.

After we'd chatted for awhile, we decided to try things out on the PC. It turned out to be pretty funny, because we could see our parents, but they couldn't see us. They could hear us, but we couldn't hear them. We would ask questions and they would answer with the homemade versions of sign language. It was hilarious! Of course I had to take a picture!

Green Thumb?

One of the reasons I was excited to buy a house was that I've wanted to plant a garden. Jen and Susannah were really gung-ho on it as well. My Uncle Darrell volunteered to help so we took him up on it this Saturday.

We bought a few boards at Lowe's and a whole bunch of topsoil with compost, manure, and fertilizer. We built the little box, laid out some newspaper because we were too lazy to take out the grass, and then filled it up with the dirt.

We then went shopping for some plants and had a good time planting them in our new little garden box. We got blackberries, strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, peas, and zucchini.

We added marigolds interspersed throughout the other stuff we planted to attract the bugs to the flowers instead of our lovely veggies and berries!

The weather was fantastic and we were finished with the garden by about 1:00 so we went back to the Garden Center for more plants to beef up and beautify the front flower beds. I really like it. We added more black mulch here and to the other flower beds we have. We love it! We'll take random trips outside just to look at everything.