rushley & crew

We had soooo much fun last weekend! I think it's because we really filled it with lots of fun and friends! We had a date on Friday that involved hanging out with some of our really good friends, and then on Saturday we got to work in the yard, go to a housewarming party for Lacey , and a cabin with Kristalyn and Luis! We bought our house brand new, so we got no yard to speak of. Since that's an added expense and we didn't work quickly enough last year, that's on the agenda for this spring. I'm actually super excited! We've started making plans and now we've finally started to do a little bit of work! Nothing too huge yet, but there is concrete, sprinkling systems, sod, plants, and other fun yard additions in our near future. I know it will be a lot of work, but I also think it will feel really good to say "We did that!" Or at least, "Russ did that!" Haha since we all know he's the manpower behind my landscaping dreams ;) It was so...

I've been really bad at recording date nights lately. Not that it's super important, but it could  be fun to look back on things we've done for dates over the years, right? Plus it could maybe give some ideas to other people, though probably not because our dates are mostly pretty vanilla ;) January We went to the dollar store and picked out like 35 birthday cards for all of our immediate family members. We didn't pick specific ones for specific people, we just picked fun ones. We plan to just use the top one for the stack for whoever comes next. Even if it's for one of our parents and it says, "You're 5!" Haha hopefully our family will like the idea :) We had fun picking out all the funny cards, and since they were only $0.50/each, we'll be spreading birthday joy this year for less than $20! (except that we still need to buy stamps and stuff . . .) We also went to the Midway Ice Castle for a date. It was kinda raining, so that was unfortuna...

For part of 2015, I was working on my 23 before 23 list . That was my first bucket list, and I really enjoyed working on it and seeing the progress I made on it. But after I finished, I knew that I wasn't going to do a 24 before 24 list; I knew I wanted to make adjustments. For one thing, I wanted to switch from birth year to calendar year because it's easier to say "In 2015 I . . . " than "In my twenty-third year I . . . ". (This switch means I've had a much less eventful second half of the year . . . with no new list to propel me forward, I've pretty much just been working on one thing--decorating the house!) The other main thing I wanted to change was how many tasks and the timeframe for said tasks. I mentioned this after I finished up my 23 list , but giving a year-long timeframe for several tasks just didn't really work for me. So in 2016, I'm going to have a huuuuge list of possibilities, but each month, I'll choose just one to ...