3rd Grade Famous American Wax Museum

Wade did a great job as Dwight Eisenhower for his big 3rd grade history project.  Here's his speech:

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
Hi.  My name is Dwight Eisenhower.  I was born on October 14th, 1890, in Denison, Texas.  I'm famous for being a five-star major general in World War I and for being the 34th president of the United States for 2 terms.  Unfortunately I died on March 28th, 1969, in Washington, D.C."


  Way to go, buddy!

Pics from our 2013 Spring Break Camping Trip

An hour north at Tuttle Creek campground--enjoy!

On the ride there--the kids were good sports about Oscar riding in the back with them.

 

 

Beautiful views!

 

Our campsite was clean and quiet, right next to the creek, and close the bathroom! :)  Check out Oscar's dog bed in the tent, ha-ha!

Having fun by the creek!

Good times!  I love that picture of Jason with the kids and Oscar!

 

Learning Heaven...not earning it

Yesterday was a busy day for all of us.  Rhiannon and I went to the Los Angeles Temple for a youth baptisms trip.  I drove Rhiannon and 5 other lovely young women down and back, all by myself.  I felt like a million bucks, carrying that "precious cargo" safely and handling the LA traffic and desert high winds okay.  The girls were fun and made the time fly by!  All together there were 18 youth and 6 adults from our ward--and we got a nice shout-out from the temple workers who praised our group for being so reverent.  It was a long day but a very good one.

Back home Jason took care of "social butterfly" Wade.  Jason dropped him off for batting practice and then watched his baseball game, helped take care of our family's turn covering baseball snacks, took Wade out to eat and then took him to a birthday party.  Jason also worked with an electrician who came by to look at a dead outlet outside (and an important one--we can't run the sprinklers until it's fixed...), and kindly ate more leftovers for dinner since his girls ate at In and Out on the way home from the temple and his son was eating dinner with a neighbor friend!

We're looking forward to Spring Break and hopefully an overnighter camping trip toward the end of the week.

At church today I learned a lot from this video on grace.  I've always had the idea that grace is when we do all we can and then Christ makes up the difference.  After watching the video, though, I understand that this is not the case.  Instead, Christ IS the difference.  Check it out--it's long, but worth it.

Oh, man.

I subbed 3 times this week, two times in a 4th grade class, and once in 5th grade.

Yesterday I guess I'd reached my limit for the week, though.  It was the end of the day, the 4th graders had been pretty good, but I was tired and getting cranky.  One thing I can't stand is when I give very c-o-n-c-i-s-e, clear directions, and then 2 minutes later half the class will say, "What are we supposed to do?"  It reminds me of that Cool Hand Luke line: "What we've got here is a failure to communicate."

So at the end of the day, I explained very carefully and slowly what the homework assignment was and what the kids were supposed to do with it when they finished.  Then I repeated the directions one more time for good measure.  And then I said, "OK.  Now I need to get serious.  I've told you exactly what you need to do.  If you come up to me and ask me what you're supposed to do with your homework, I'm going to take your paper, tear it in two, and throw it away."  (I know, not very classy on my part.)

Sure enough, one girl came up to me maybe 5 minutes later (after the rest of the class had gotten to work and were glad to have some free time to work on the homework assignment.  We'd even taken a moment to answer the hardest question together). 

She said, "Mrs. Cushing, do we have homework tonight?"

Oh, man. 

I had so many things come to my brain.  What planet was she on?  Not only had she missed the twice-repeated directions just a couple minutes ago, she'd missed the fact that there even WAS an assignment.

I think my eyes bugged out of my head and my eyebrows went to my hairline, but, no, I didn't take her paper and throw it away, because she didn't even know which paper it was.  I could have marched over to her desk and made some big drama out of it, but my balloon had been popped and all I could feel was sadness for this poor girl.  How many other things did she miss that day, or every day? 

Highlights from the week--March is here!

Jason has made some major improvements to our landscaping the past two weekends.  He rented a stump grinder and borrowed a chain saw and took out both palo verde trees and ALL the oleanders.  Our yard looks different, but good. The next day we got half a pick-up truck of dried horse manure for our garden areas, and then today Jason ground all that in with a rototiller.  The kids will get to help me plant the garden areas over Spring Break--I can't wait to see how it grows this year!

(As I type this, Jason is running around upstairs chasing Oscar and teasing Rhiannon about his box of Girl Scout cookies that he doesn't plan on sharing.  I wish I could video tape it, but I'd be DEAD MEAT if I did. :))

Rhiannon had a busy week with an exciting band trip on Thursday and a science convention today.

(Mwa-ha-ha, RC is taking over now.)
My band trip was AMAZING. It wasn't a for-fun trip though. My school's concert orchestra and concert band, which includes moi, went to Phelan. It was a four hour drive altogether, two hours there and back, so everyone rode on the bus. You'd think it would be complete torture with 60+ kids on the bus, but it was fun. I sat next to my F-R-I-E-N-D (Dad teases me about him being my boyfriend) Jacob who I've known since 1st grade. We played Angry Birds Star Wars on my ipod and that was fun. When we got there, a high school girl "escort" took us to the instrument storage room. (I tried not to laugh at all the guys, because their jaws were on the ground when they saw the pretty high schooler. It was pretty funny: )  So we put our instruments away, and went in to watch a performance. Everyone was like whoop-de-doo, because we just wanted to play, but the performance was really good! It was this high school band from somewhere in California, and it was like watching a performance by Hans Zimmer or something. The high schoolers finished, and it was time for us to warm up in this room. Or so we thought. We stood outside for 30 minutes in the 40 degree weather without jackets. That sucked because when instruments are too cold, they get out of tune really bad. I think that was one of the things that affected our peformance. After the other people got out (FINALLY)  we went in and warmed up even though we were WAY OFF KEY. After warm up time we went onto the gigantic stage. We percussionists set up but we realized something--WE DIDNT HAVE ANY CYMBALS!!

Cymbals are crucial for most of our songs...But we had to play anyway. Everyone played the songs like they were supposed to, but the judges at festival gave us a "Good." Good means we got a C, which sucks. But we tried our best!  Everyone was kind of bummed, but we did okay.  So there's my band recap--yayzers! : ) Kay, Mom's back now...

Thanks, Rhiannon!  She was gone most of the day today at an Expanding Your Horizons science conference with other local 6th through 8th grade girls.  Rhiannon said her classes were amazing--Eye in the Sky was her favorite, where she learned about military tactics and satellite imaging.  Her other classes were on DNA and electric circuits.  The girls had pizza for lunch and enjoyed some neat guest speakers.  I think it's an amazing program--I wish I'd been able to participate in something like that when I was her age!

Wade has had a great week.  This weekend he just finished up the final objectives for 5th grade math.  I have to remind myself he's in 3rd grade--we're so glad he's able to do challenging things and have fun at school! 

We were really proud of Wade today, too.  At the Opening Day ceremonies for baseball this morning, they asked coaches to pick one player from their team to be in a photo-op with some sponsors from the city.  Wade was excited when he got chosen out of the 12 boys to represent his team--and WE were excited to learn why his coaches chose him.  Apparently he'd been the only kid on the team "with discipline" during the ceremonies, who wasn't messing around.  That earned Wade some big smiles from his parents, AND he got lunch with his dad, too.  

Right now Wade is outside somewhere playing with friends in the neighborhood, a group of 6 or 7 good boys.  I guess I should go round him up for dinner soon, but I have no idea whose house he's at, and it's nice not worrying about that fact one bit!  I'm lazy and usually send Rhiannon outside to chase him down for me. :)

I think the only "downer" today was that all baseball games got cancelled because of the rain we got yesterday.  It was an ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS day for baseball, but the fields were a mess! 

My week sped by.  I volunteered a lot at Wade's school this week helping with the book fair, and then I subbed on Friday.  It rained all day long, which is a cause for celebration here in the desert!  The only bad thing was the room I was in had a major water leak dripping from the ceiling.  Water leaks + second graders make for a bit of crazy drama and excitement, but eventually the kids settled down and we had a good day.

Is this post done yet? :)  My fingers hurt! :)