rushley & crew

Holidays are a tricky thing for newlyweds, and something that, 2.5 years later, we still seem to be figuring out. We spent our first Thanksgiving with his family and our first Christmas with mine, and since then, we have swapped each holiday each year. We live relatively close to both families (15 minutes from mine, 6 hours from his) , so this works pretty well for us. However, we've discovered we still need to take the time to make holidays our own, too. Since it was my family's year to have us for Christmas, we spent a lot  of time over there during the break. I still have my room at my parents' house, so although we live close, most nights we would just stay over at my parents'. My sister's family was also visiting from Texas, so we wanted to spend as much time with them as possible. But because we spent so much time at my parents' house, Russ and I kind of neglected to figure out when we would have our own celebration. This led to a sticky situation w...

Wahoo! Thanksgiving is almost here! I've already had two plus a third time of leftovers, but I'm still excited :) We brought back Tomothy the Thankful Turkey this year, and he's filled out quite nicely with feathers :) Turns out Russ was right . . . smaller feathers looks better. I haven't done any thankful posts yet this November, so I'm going to do one today, about the things I'm thankful for that are coming up in the next week! Time Out For Women! I'm thankful I get to go again this year; I'm thankful for my mama for paying for it; I'm thankful I get to go with my mom, sis-in-law, grandma, aunt, and cousin/best friend!; I'm thankful that we're going to eat at the Cheesecake Factory for dinner along with the event!; I'm thankful my husband lets me go on girlie weekend trips without him, though I'll miss him :) Boise! I'm thankful that Russ and I get to go visit family in Boise; I'm thankful for all the fun we...

For anyone who is friends with me on Facebook, you already know that I had something very  irritating happen to me yesterday evening. So irritating, that I'm having a hard time getting over it, and some of the things that followed. But instead of focusing on that, I'm going to take a cue from  Lisa  and post about things I'm thankful for today, because I could use a little boost. And since I can't rely on anyone else to boost me up (not for lack of others trying, but just because we're the only ones who can boost ourselves--we have to make that choice), I suppose I'll take this measure to give myself that boost. I'm thankful that Russ has perfected the bread recipe, because it's the best bread I've ever tasted! It's seriously amazing. I normally don't like bread that much, but I eat this bread like candy. I'm thankful that Russ and I are so similar. It's nice to have someone I can rely and depend on, who knows me and agrees ...

I haven't even seen the lego movie, and in creating this post, it's only the first time I've even heard the song, but I've heard about this song a bunch lately and it's the only thing that came into my head as I was thinking about my life right now: Everything is awesome! Part 1 With four jobs and twelve credits, life is a little crazy. And sometimes, everything stacks up at once, which gets really crazy. But lucky for me, even though I just had a stack-up, everything has been staggered just enough to work-- Feb 22 - Sociolinguistics midterm Feb 28 - Sewing midterm Mar 3 - Sociolinguistics project & 8-page paper due Mar 4 - History of English midterm; all worksheets for HoE unit 2 due Mar 5 - Design project 1 due Mar 6 - Completed skirt (for sewing) due I'm the kind of person who likes to focus on one thing at a time until I finish. If I have two tests on the same day, I have a really hard time with it because I don't feel like I can ...

For the first 19 years of my life, I've spent Christmas like most people: with my family.  I'd wake up in my bed Christmas morning and anxiously wait until the whole family was showered and ready to open presents. But this year was a little bit different. For the first time, my bed wasn't at my parents' house. It was in my very own apartment with my wonderful husband :) and christmas morning at our own place was perfect. We woke up, ate German pancakes for breakfast, and opened presents together (we couldn't wait to open our stockings . . . those got opened Christmas Eve). He got me awesome things like Balto ,  What I Like About You  season 1, and a sweet card. Though I spent a ton of time in the days leading up to Christmas making him a passport for destination dates in the upcoming year, his favorite gift turned out to be The Snowman , his favorite Christmas movie from childhood (so favorite, in fact, that the tape got broken from overuse!). He teared up b...

So in the last month . . . Russ and I spent Thanksgiving in Idaho with the fam . . . we both got sick . . . so did pretty much everyone else . . . we watched a lot of Monk . . . and of course ate fantastic food!   It was wonderful :) Russ and I celebrated our 6 month anniversary! Crazy to think that just a year ago, Russ and I were just starting to date, and now, a year later, we've already been married for 6 months! Crazy how life works out . . . I love it :) To celebrate, we ate a real breakfast . . .  camel eyes, sausage, and sparkling cider . . . and then that night we ate the top tier of our wedding cake. She decorated it differently than our real wedding cake, and it turned out beautifully! :) It was a nice day :) I also had to study A TON and face finals. They didn't go as well as I would have liked, but not too bad. Not to mention there were a lot of little miracles concerning finals . . . like a teacher being willing to give me some points someth...

Last Friday, Russ and I went to the dollar theater. We saw The Odd Life of Timothy Green. We thoroughly enjoyed it. We also both bawled our eyes out. Yeah. It's one of those movies. :) We highly recommend it. We also started a Thanksgiving family tradition! We adopted it from Russ's family. In Russ's family, they have what they call Gordon the Gratitude Gobbler. They put him up at Thanksgiving time and then write things they're thankful for on feathers for Gordon. When Russ told me about it, I liked it a lot :) So our turkey has a different name and looks a little bit different than the Holmes family turkey, but it's the same basic idea :) Meet Tomothy the Thankful Turkey! **ashleynicole

School is starting to drive me crazy. I just want to spend time with my husband and family and friends . . . is that so wrong? But alas, school likes to get in the way. Luckily, last weekend I did get a break. We went up to Boise for some Holmes Family Fun! :) It was a packed weekend! I am seriously not quite sure how we manage to fit so many things in when it's a Holmes trip. It's crazy, but super fun! We only had one full day in Boise--Saturday. Here's how we spent it: first The boys went and voted . . .  . . . while the girls painted for Empty Bowls.  lacey's lacey's mom's mom's mine Russ didn't actually think he was going to be able to vote this year because he realized he wasn't yet registered after the registration deadline! So it was lucky that we happened to be going to Boise so close to the election because he just got to register and vote all at once.  For Empty Bowl...