Fun on a Friday night, plus fun random pictures from the last week

Hard to believe that 3 months have already gone by in 2016!!!

It's been a fun April Fool's Day!  Rhiannon has been the champion--she put stuff in Wade's shoes, colored the milk in the fridge blue, put salt in our water glasses, and faked injuries at school.  She has enjoyed every minute of it, haha!  Wade hid some of Rhiannon's books.  Jason tried to trick me into thinking he was drunk, hanging out with co-workers after work today, and I tricked Wade pretty great at 5:50 am when I told him that his teacher had emailed me and said he didn't have to do a large class project because his grade was so high...I felt a little guilty about that one!

Right now both kids have friends over.  Wade is playing video games with Tucker in one room, and Rhiannon and Sierra are watching Napoleon Dynamite in another.  It's fun to listen to them all laughing!

Tomorrow Rhiannon will be gone most of the day to a drum line competition, and the rest of us don't have much going on besides watching General Conference (which I am really looking forward to!).

Here are some other random pictures of goings-on the last couple weeks:

Rhiannon took a bunch of funny pictures on my phone--loved it!

Easter Sunday!

  

On Tuesday (after a VERY windy Monday) I joined friend Megan Hall and her son Daniel up at the new walking path up to the college.  We had a blast and got over 4 miles in!

Wade had a local band festival on Wednesday night.  He did a great job and had fun with it!

Rhiannon had SOOO much fun with the high school's Spirit Days this week.  Her favorite was the Comic-Con day!  Here she is with her friend Katie Johnson, who was a Dr. Who weeping angel!

We love The Flash!

  

Without pre-planning, Rhiannon and one of her really good buddies (friends since kindergarten!) Jacob Kelley both represented Flash that day.  Too funny!

The Insectasaurus hat is still around.  She wore this and a bunch of other crazy stuff for "What in the World?" Day!



Finally, here are some videos from Wade's band festival!  He's in the back, towards the right, playing on the mallets.

Today is a gift

Today has been a lovely Easter Sunday.  Church was nice.  One talk in particular, by our friend Lora Evans (who just got back from serving a mission in the Des Moines Iowa area), was very powerful.  She talked about the Atonement and it was amazing!  I wish I'd recorded and taken notes. 

After church we delivered "Easter dinner to-go" to our friends Howard and Sandi.  Sandi had just had foot surgery, and we were happy to stop by for a few minutes and say hello.  

This weekend we had a family date to see Batman v. Superman--it was a dark movie, but we enjoyed it.  We sure do love our super-hero genre movies!!!

That same day we had a Girls Night-Guys Night, too.  Rhiannon and I joined other ladies at Kristin Hawkins' home to eat and watch the Women's Session of conference.  The boys went out to Classic Burger in Inyokern!

This week Wade has a band concert and Rhiannon has a drumline competition.  We are feeding the sister missionaries on Thursday night, too.  The rest of the week is pretty normal, the usual fun! 

I'm looking forward to General Conference this weekend, too!

Happy Easter 2016!

We've all had the day off on this Good Friday--it's been nice.  Rhiannon has been the busiest of us all, taking on a babysitting job and now partying up at a friend's 5-hour birthday party (whew!).  Both the kids pulled lots of weeds for me today, too, which I really appreciated.  Wade's Scout camp-out got cancelled, so he's enjoyed a lot of video game time!

Our Easter baskets are very simple this year.  We have a tradition of doing the baskets on Saturday morning, to be able to focus more on the Savior on Sunday, instead of candy, candy, candy.

Instead of buying gobs of candy like I've usually done, I just bought a couple things and then filled plastic eggs with little strips of paper on which I wrote either love notes, coupons for fun things or acts of service, and a favorite Easter scripture (Matthew 28:6).

I even gave myself a few love notes, such as "Remember to enjoy the magic of ordinary days!"  I feel really good about the baskets and hope they will be received well, haha! :)   Idea for the Easter love notes here:  http://growingupgabel.com/easter-baskets-idea-for-kids/

Jason was out of town Monday thru Thursday this week and got back yesterday afternoon.  He is still not 100%, but feeling a little better each day.  Tuesday was an absolutely crazy insane day (Wade gone to Disneyland from 5am to almost 1am the next morning), drumline for Rhiannon, institute class and a sub job for me....but we made it through!

Institute class was magical this week.  I came prepared to teach several highlights from the whole book of Deuteronomy, but we spent almost half the class time talking about temple marriage.  In fact, the class joked that it was a "Face-to-Face Event with Sister Cushing."  One of our class members said something to the effect of, "Well, here we are talking about temple marriage and there's only one person in the room who's been married in the temple.  So, Sister Cushing, mind if we ask you some questions?"

It was an incredible experience for me.  Everyone appreciated that I set my lesson notes aside and just rolled with it.  They asked me how a temple marriage had blessed us, what Jason and I did to strengthen our marriage, etc, and then they all thanked me for taking that time with them.  There was an amazing spirit in the room, a feeling of openness and hope and love for each other and our potential.  I can't remember half of the things I shared, but I do know I came home and texted Jason about what had happened, told him I loved him, and appreciated all he did for me!

Not every lesson is like that.  This one was special, and, I felt, particularly guided by the Spirit, Usually I glaze over anything having to do with "marriage" because these young single adults hear it over and over and over, ya know?  But it was meant to be that night, and we were all blessed by it!