Merry New Year

It took me three hours but I'm done. Christmas has been put away and the house is back to normal. Now some may call me Scrooge for getting tired of the trees and decorations; but in our home they have been up now for 34 days and I say that is plenty of time. I did have to do this on my own as Mike is working a 24 hr shift today and the girls are playing with friends. But to have the peace of mind that my home is again in order is well worth it. The only thing left to do is for Mike to put away his 27 nutcrackers. Yes - 27 of them. I don't touch them; if they happen to break I don't want to be responsible. So there ya go. Happy New Year Everyone!

Happy Holidays from the Rogers

Christmas 2008

Christmas Vacation

The girls were off for the Christmas holiday on Friday so we decided to put together this little gingerbread house.

New Addition to the Rogers Home

This is our 3 month old Yorkie. Her name is Lacie and she is a whopping 2 pounds.

Stringing up the lights........

We got our two trees up on Friday and Saturday. I ended up having to go get three more strands of lights because I got ticked off trying to find what bulb was out (even with a tester) and it was worth the $2 just to buy another strand. We have our regular tree. And we have our Disney tree that has all our disney ornaments we collect every year. I'm sure glad this is just once a year!

Rogers Thanksgiving

Mike's parents came for the holiday but his dad went on down to southern MO. So we spent the majority of the time with Grandma. We were originally planning on 11 people at our home for dinner, but because of unforseen circumstances it was just the 5 of us.  

We did a turkey with a recipie from the Food Network, mashed potatoes/gravy, garlic green beans, turkey stuffing, hickory pit bbq beans from Jack Stack (yummy!), rolls,a veggie tray, pecan pie, pumpkin pie, a pumpkin roll and the great carbonated grape juice that our girls call the "burping drink" because well..... it makes you burp!

Blessings In Heaven

Many of you know it is not my favorite thing to feed the missionaries. I will probably be struck down by lightening, but I don't think it teaches these 19 year old men any responsibility if these women are taking over mama's job and cooking them dinner every night.  Yeah, I know, I know: their responsibility is teaching the gospel and converting people and it helps offset the cost - I've heard all the arguements. But still, I think these young men need to cook for themselves, clean their apartments, and do their own laundry - not instill in them that some woman is going to do this for them the rest of their lives.

But I digress. Last night an opportunity presented itself that I just couldn't resist. One of our favorite places to eat in town is Longhorn Steakhouse. Their food is awesome and if anyone has been there before, it isn't cheap. The average price of a meal is about $17. We decided a good steak sounded good for dinner last night so we went. Lo and behold waiting for a table were two elders. I believe they are serving in the Olathe Stake because I did not recognize them. They said a friend of theirs worked there and said they should try it out. Elder Bradshaw kind of chuckled, as a steakhouse isn't a typical eating establishment for a missionary budget.

After they were seated I tracked down the manager and asked how we could pay for their meal. I told her what they were and said it was something we'd like to do. We were seated in a different section than they were so we had a different waiter. Towards the end of dinner, the elders' waiter came over and wanted to know if it was ok to have dessert added on to the bill. He said the elders changed their mind when they found out dessert was about $5 a piece. I said go ahead and let them order. 

To make this long story short, we paid for the dinner and the restaurant picked up the tab for the dessert. I told the manager that we wanted to remain anonymous. Her story to us was she had gone over to the missionaries asked how their dinner was and if the dessert was to their liking. They said everything was great. She told them that this is how it was going to be: the restaurant was paying for their dessert and someone dining was paying for their dinner and wanted to remain anonymous. She said they were so pleased and grateful almost to the point of tears of joy. So what could have easily been a $60 meal for them was free.

If that doesn't bring blessings in heaven, I don't know what will.

Stars of the Week

Each class at Cedar Creek Elementary has a "Star of the Week" student. It just so happened that Savannah and Haylie were each the star in their classes just a week apart. Here they are with their bulletin board display inside the class.

Christmas Countdown

Yes, its that time again. How many more shopping days until Christmas?? But I am DONE (mostly). 

I say mostly, because we do save the shopping for our girls until December and we do it as a date with

dinner included. But since the girls are in school all day, we can do it as a daytime date. But I digress.

I am not one of those people that thrive on last-minute shopping or the obscene amounts of people in the

store. In fact, I have completed my shopping from the comforts of my own home. What a novel idea that

internet is! And even though I have done it only once - I do not participate in Black Friday and get up at

some ungodly hour to get a deal on some item that neither I nor anyone else on our list needs or wants.

Whats the point? I will relish in the thought that I can now enjoy the sights and sounds of these next

two holidays without the stress of what to buy, where to buy it, when to send it, etc etc. Happy Holidays 

everyone!

KS vs UT

No, this is not about football or basketball or baseball. This is just something I have been thinking about for a long time and decided to put it out there for others to read. Now, my entire existance was in Utah prior to my family re-locating to Kansas 5 1/2 years ago. I am by no means trying to dis family or friends who still reside there. However, I have been told in no uncertain terms that some will never come to Kansas because there is "nothing to do". I beg to differ. Mike and I married in 1998. So we lived in UT for 5 years as a married family. We have now lived in Kansas for the same amount of time. And...... we have done more here in that same time period than we did in Utah. So just for my peace of mind I decided to compare the two. So here is my results in KS vs UT.

Kansas Utah

Worlds of Fun  (no contest) Lagoon

Kansas City Zoo  (huge) Hogle Zoo 

Union Station

Science City

Oceans of Fun Seven Peaks

Paradise Park Boondocks

The Legends Shopping Gateway

The Plaza (14 blocks of shop/dine)

City of Fountains (over 200 of them!)

Plaza Lights Lights on Temple Square

Deanna Rose Farmstead

Kansas City Chiefs

Kansas City Royals

Zona Rosa

American Royal Parade Pioneer Day Parade

Schlitterbahn (2009)

Celebration at the Station (Mem Day)

Lakefest Fireworks (annually)

Christmas In the Sky Fireworks (Nov)

Crown Center Ice Terrace Gallivan Center

Alpine Slide

Camping at the lakes Camping in the mountains

Snow skiing (sometimes) Snow skiing

Utah Jazz

1,985,429 people in 253 square miles 2,150,000 people in 111 square mi

And the winner is..........   KS 23 :  UT 13

I'm sure I could think of more, but I don't have time to sit in front of the computer all day. I welcome any rebuttals.

Happy Halloween!

We had an awesome halloween. There are 15 families in our part of the subdivision and 12 of them attended our first ever block party. It was a great turnout. We had a chili cookoff and most of our neighbors who are Hindu brought food from their country which was really good. We have decided that we want to do this on a monthly basis during the summer. Mike took all the kids around the rest of the neighborhood trick-or-treating. A good time was had by all!

Absolutely Incredible!

The Lion King is in Kansas City until Nov 16. 

We went with the girls today downtown at

the Music Hall. First we ate lunch at a great

burger joint in the Power & Light District called

Chefburger. It was most AWESOME.

FHE Activity

With 4 days left until the big day we decided to carve our pumpkins for Family Home Evening. This is the result.

Cute Bathroom

This is one of the "themed" rooms in our home. It is our guest bathroom. Before we even moved into our home I had started buying Disney stuff to decorate it. And these are the latest additions. I had seen these several years ago on our annual trip to Disneyland and finally got around to purchasing them. Aren't they just the coolest drawer pulls you've ever seen! :-)

Marvin Has Left the Building

If you've noticed Marvin's picture is no longer in our list of pictures. Before we left for the weekend we took him to the vet and had him adopted out to another family. The girls will miss him terribly but we just could not get him potty trained. We had him since June and he is now 7 months old. We thought we had crate trained him correctly. He would go outside just to come in and go again on our carpet. He spent most of his time either outside or in his crate and not very happy. This new family is willing to start from scratch in training him and he will be much happier. We'll miss you Marvin!

All I Want For Christmas........

She lost these within two days of each other. Don't ya just love the spider "tootaws".

BYU Who???!!!

As many of you know we went to the BYU/TCU game last week. What a crock of @#!$. We left during the 3rd Qtr. The rest of the time we spent seeing the sights around Ft Worth. We went to the Stockyards which has dining, shopping, and entertainment. Also went to the Ft Worth Zoo.   They have an AWESOME cattle drive they do twice a day of the Texas Longhorns. Next day we spent at Six Flags Over Texas. I had been here before as a child when we'd visit Grammy in Lubbock. Then on our way home we had to stop in Stillwater, OK (home of Oklahoma State University) and eat at Eskimo Joe's - Stillwaters Jumpin Little Juke Joint.

Holiday Fun

On a Saturday that Daddy was busy

we decided to make Halloween decor.

These were cute foam crafts I picked

up at Michaels. Savannah did the 

haunted graveyard and Haylie did the

haunted house. Turned out great!

Be Prepared

Are you prepared? Ours is a work in progress. We have been told time and again by the Prophet to get our homes and our finances in order. This is our food storage as of today. I had been in the habit of just putting stuff downstairs after I got home from the store and needless to say it was disorganized (WHO, ME?) and pretty chaotic. Yesterday was a gloomy, rainy day so I turned on the tv in the basement and spent 2 hours getting our storage back in order. We have started making monthly trips to Costco for the big stuff. Most things I do find less expensive per item at WalMart.

We have also started ordering from Shelf Reliance (www.shelfreliance.com). They are one of several companies that do the #10 cans of food items. But they also have these great rotation devices you can put together to hold any cans. These are good for those of us without the talent to build a shelving unit ourselves. We also buy from Emergency Essentials (www.beprepared.com) and A LOT of #10 items are the least expensive at Walton Feed (www.waltonfeed.com). 

I say this is a work-in-progress because as much as we'd like to we can't do a full years supply for all four of us in one big swoop. We'd be looking at just about $7500.00 from Shelf Reliance. I do get to the cannery every so often but they still don't have everything these other companies have. This is the end result......

Kansas City Temple

We're getting a temple! We are so excited. Don't know exactly what "the greater Kansas City area" is supposed to entail but we have our theories that it will be on the 12 acre property the church acquired that our new Stake Center is going up on. We can only hope. How awesome to be 2 minutes away from a temple and not 4 hours.

Last Official Day of Summer

  Today is officially the first day of fall - well actually at 10:45 a.m. or something like that. We decided to end out the summer with a bbq at the lake. Hillsdale Lake is about 30 miles from our home. It has camping, picnicing, fishing, and boating. They also have jetski's for rent which we haven't tried yet but are anxious to do next summer. We bbq'd hamburgers and did our favorite - s'mores!

Orlando

Move over Hanna and Ike. We forged ahead with our plans to Orlando in between two hurricanes. My mom joined us this time as she had never done the disney trip with us before. We had a lot of fun. We thought for sure going in Sept that the weather would be cooler but we suffered through temperatures of 92 and humidity worse than Kansas! There weren't too many people so we were able to walk right onto rides. I think the longest wait we had was on a Saturday and waited 30 minutes for something. I can't believe people actually go in the middle of summer with hoards of people and higher temperatures!

We did the whole thing. The Magic Kingdom, Hollywood Studios (formerly known as MGM), Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure, Epcot, and Sea World.

I do have to admit that I much prefer Disneyland over Walt Disney World. Sorry FL!

Camping

Finally got to our camping trip for the year. Didn't take any pictures worth posting though. Most of the time we try to go more than once but this year we plugged into Labor Day weekend. Our favorite place is Watkins Mill in MO. Mike and the girls went fishing and we took Marvin with us. He had a blast. But he was definately due for a bath when we got home.

Family

Mike's cousin Jonas and his wife Rachel have moved to Lawrence for a year. We are so excited to have them close! Baby Anderson is due anytime now. Uncle Joe and Aunt Darlene were out here to help them move into their apt and we helped with what we could. We took this before they flew back out to UT.

St Louis Temple Trip

Finally were able to get to the temple in August. I don't think we had been all summer! St Louis has this funky place called The City Museum. It was totally awesome. It had slides, lots of stuff to climb, caves (behind the walls and even under the floor), and tunnels. 

Belton Train Ride

Went on the Belton Train with our friends Brad & Shannon. It was a fun activity that we had never done before. We were served hot dogs, chips and a drink but decided to get a "real" dinner and hit the local Applebee's on the way home. 

20 Tagged

I was reading my friend Shannon's blog and she had been tagged by one of her friends. I thought it was a great tag idea and Shannon if you don't mind I'm going to post mine.

20 Years Ago: I was 21 and living in Logan, UT going to Utah State University. GO AGGIES! Having fun with my roomies and working at Skippers.

10 Years Ago: Mike and I got married in the Salt Lake Temple. We had bought our first home in West Valley City. I was working for GE Capital Financial and if I remember right Mike was just finishing up nursing school and working for Discover Card before going to LDS Hospital.

5 Years Ago: We moved to Lenexa, KS so Mike could go to KUMC for graduate school. Savannah was 4 and Haylie was 1. We found a little 2 bedroom apartment. I just totally loved this area and did not want to ever go back to UT.

3 Years Ago: Mike graduated with his Masters Degree this year. He signed on with Overland Park Medical Center which was just down the street from our apartment. I was still the stay-home-mom and Savannah was in 1st grade. I was babysitting a little girl for xtra "fun money".

1 Year Ago: We had been in our new home for a full year. We had it built in 2006. We are still residents of Lenexa and love it all. I was one of the Achievement Day leaders for the 8&9 year old girls in our ward. 

1 Month Ago: We were getting ready for school to start. Savannah is in the 4th grade and Haylie is in 1st grade. 

1 Week Ago: Just left for a fabulous week in Orlando, FL. My mom came with us. We went to Sea World, Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure, Disney's Hollywood Studios (formerly MGM), The Magic Kingdom, and Epcot. I was actually ready to come home by Friday. :-)

Now I tag all my blogger friends. Tara, Rachel, Daisie, this means you.

Mindless Fodder

To all you moms out there. I love back-2-school shopping. I loved getting new stuff as a kid and I love taking my girls to get their supplies. Last week was my date with Haylie and thats what we did. Yesterday was my date with Savannah and we went supply shopping. However......I don't know how many school districts offer this "special". We got a list at the end of the school year last year with an order form from EPI who offer to get the supplies for you and custom pack them depending on the grade your student is in. What a bunch of hokey. For instance: My first grader had a list of 17 items. EPI wanted to charge me $29. Spending just 30 minutes at Wal-Mart for all this stuff cost me $19.76. So for another $9.24 they would have given me a box and plastic wrap that I'd just throw away. Again, my fourth grader had a list of 27 items. EPI cost: $35. Same 30 minutes at Wal-Mart cost me $25.06. Instead of throwing $9.94 away on a box and plastic (which would buy three kids meals at Chic-Fil-A) I got out of the house, spent quality time with my daughters while teaching them the virtues of smart spending. Side note: the order form states that the supply packs are sold at the "school's cost" - yeah right.

I Wanna Crush Cars.....

My closest friends know that I REALLY want a big bad maama jaama truck when our hybrid is paid off. I know, I know, "but gas prices are $3/gal and they get 11 mpg! What the heck...... I want to crush cars......

Swim Lessons

Today was the last day of swimming lessons. Since we moved here we have continued up the ranks with Lenexa Parks & Rec. Here are just some cute pics of this mornings last class. Haylie passed Level 3 and there are just 3 technical items Savannah has to pass off in Level 5 so we'll try again next year!

Coco Key Water Resort

Our normal activity for good grades was going to the Great Wolf Lodge. This year we decided to try the new Coco Key Water Resort located in the Sheraton in KCMO. A fun time was had by all.