Let them have their cake . . .

Yesterday our ward Relief Society had it's enrichment meeting - a birthday celebration for the Relief Society program. For it, we received instruction on cake decorating.

Here's our fun table working on our cakes.

This picture is of the cakes Susannah and I made. She did the butterfly and I did the stars. They were going to throw away the extra cakes so we got them and decided to be productive with them.

We stopped by the bike shop to bring Adam a cake at work.

Abraham was next on the list at Sprint.

I came home and made 2 layer cakes out of the 4 little cakes Cara gave us. I thought they turned out pretty cute! We cut and ate one of them last night when people came over. The other we'll probably give to one of the girls we visit teach.

I LOVE BERRIES!!!

I love to see the temple!

Last Tuesday, March 25th, was kind of an anniversary for me.

10 years ago on that date I was able to go to the temple to receive my own endowments in the Mt. Timpanogos Temple in American Fork, Utah. I was then a student at BYU and had received my mission call to the Tennessee Nashville Mission. It was a great experience. Except for my mission, which didn't have a temple in it's boundaries, I've attended the temple just about every week since that date. It would be great to say I'd visited all the temples, but since there are well over 100, I don't know how possible that would be unless I came into a lot of money for traveling. Here's a list of all the temples I've been in to do temple work. I've seen several others, but not been inside.
1. Mt. Timpanogos, American Fork, UT
2. Provo, Provo, UT
3. Hawaii, Laie, HI
4. Salt Lake, Salt Lake City, UT
5. Arizona, Mesa, AZ
6. Nashville, Franklin, TN
7. New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM
8. Jordan River, South Jordan, UT
9. Houston, Houston, TX
10. Washington D.C., Washington D.C.
11. Lubbock, Lubbock, TX
12. Snowflake, Snowflake, AZ
13. Dallas, Dallas, TXThis is a picture of the Houston Temple, my current temple district. I'm blessed to be an ordinance worker there and am so grateful for that opportunity.I took this picture of the Houston temple on the night of my 10 year anniversary. The picture below shows my faithful temple buddies!

Happy Easter!

CUTE!

On Easter Sunday, my Aunt Maylene and Uncle Darrell were kind enough to feed us a delicious dinner along with our cousin Eric, his wife and kiddos, and several of our friends! They're so sweet! I love this picture of Eric and Wendy's cute kids in their bunny ears!

When Bushman babies are born, one of the first orders of business is to check for "Turley fingers." Brandt is a lucky recipient of the distinctive gene! I couldn't get a very clear picture. He wasn't too excited about me taking pictures of his hands.

Eric, Brandt's dad, has some definite Turley characteristics, taking after his dad and a couple of uncles. I love it! I think I posted some of my dad, uncles, and my cousin Stephanie's baby at a wedding reception last year. They've all got some fantastic Turley fingers.

Here are the Bushman relatives in attendance. It's always a good time!

We also had to get a YSA picture for those where in attendance. We were happy to have Lala, Kim, and Adam join us for Easter dinner too! Another big thanks to the Call family for feeding us all!

Village Creek

On Good Friday and the Saturday after, I went on a canoing trip with a group of about 40 people. It was loads of fun.

The first order of business was to have Susannah braid my hair so I wouldn't have to worry about it on the trip. She did a great job. This picture was taken after the trip, so it had gone through a few days and two nights' sleeps! Susannah is the best!

This picture is of the group of us from the Houston area that went. The rest of the people were from Texas A&M. We heard a whole lot of "whoop"ing going on. It was a good time, though. We shoved off near Kountze, TX

There were two to a canoe. Kim and I were rowing buddies.

Here's some of our group as we're heading down the river.

The first day was the longest and had the most obstacles. We had to go under several fallen trees, laying down in our canoes to clear it. This particular one, we had to go over. It was a skinny log that was partially submerged. Luckily Katherine (AKA Superwoman) helped us over by pulling our canoe diagonally across the log. I think we went about 12 miles the first day.

We found a sandbar and pulled over to camp for the night. We fit a lot of people and a lot of canoes on that sandbar!

Jen was in charge of dinner. We helped her as best we could. She burned her hand on some boiling water!

Here's a shot of some of the yummy spaghetti and meatballs we had. It was so good!

Here's the whole Houston crew again on the second day. Despite some sunburns, sore muscles, and lack of toilets, it was a fantastic trip.

This is a video we shot just an hour or two before we finished the 19-20 mile course. We stopped at another sandbar just before lunch to go for a dip. Fun times.

I had to close out with this shot. Susannah and Jen helped me take out the multitude of braids. I was actually contemplating wearing my hair like this to church until I caught a big whiff of campfire odor and decided my hair was due for a good wash!

The Drive-In

Our Saturday night was full of fun at the drive-in.

A group of us drove out to the theater off of 2920 near 290. It was called the Showboat Theater. For more info, click here.

It was a double feature for only $5 per person. We watched "Horton Hears a Who" which we LOVED and another movie called "Jumper" which wasn't our favorite.

These are just some group shots. It got pretty cold after the sun had been down for a bit! Katherine had a great set-up in her truck bed.

Katherine had run a half marathon that morning in Galveston. Way to go!

Monarchs

Monarch Butterflies are a common sight in Texas during the spring. They fly through Texas on their way to Mexico.

I really liked this picture I found on the Internet.

The other day, the room mom for our class brought in some of the milkweed plants from her garden at home. Apparently Monarchs only lay their eggs on milkweed because they're bitter, making the larva that feed on them bitter as well. That keeps them from being eaten by predators. If you look at the picture above, you can see an egg on the leaf of the milkweed plant.

She also brought in several larva. She let us all hold them which was pretty cool. The kids were so excited!

This one's in my hand. It left me an unsavory little morsel. I'm pretty sure they did not enjoy all of the commotion in my classroom.

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.