Christmas letter to family and friends

December 10, 2009
Dear Family and Friends-
As the days begin to get shorter and the weather turns cool, we enter a wonderful season when we take time to give thanks for all our blessings, and to focus our attention on the Savior’s birth and the blessing that this event has afforded all of us. This last year has brought countless blessings to our family and we would like to take the opportunity to share these with you.
On Easter Sunday, Eli Rogers was born. Eli is a happy healthy 8 month old monster of a boy. Eli loves to play with his sisters and is rarely found without a smile on his face. Eli’s favorite thing to do is eat, and eating he does! Everything he finds goes into his mouth. Eli is the fastest army crawler the world has ever seen. He is quick to follow his sisters everywhere they go.
During Thanksgiving, we paused to celebrate the 3rd Birthday of our little Lucy. Lucy has really grown this last year and her personality is quickly developing. Lucy has learned a thousand new words and has begun to communicate with others besides her immediate family. Lucy loves to ask questions such as, “What would happen if an alligator bites you?” Lucy has begun taking “big girl” dance classes and is excited to perform in her first recital this next week.
Joy turned five this year and has begun kindergarten. Joy is thrilled at this new stage of her life and is anxious to learn as much as she can. Joy loves to practice reading and is getting quite good as this new found talent. Joy also loves her social life. As everyone knows, Joy is always surrounded by friends and does not know a stranger.
In October, Amanda got one of her heart’s greatest desires for her birthday as we moved into our new house. Our house was begun in June and was finished in time for Amanda’s birthday. We got to plan and select many items for our house. At times this was a bit stressful, but in the end was so worth it. Amanda works full time raising her family and feels blessed to have this opportunity.
Dale is still at Home Depot where he works as an assistant manager. Dale enjoys his position and the challenges that it brings. Dale was able to lay tile in our new house with his bothers and friends to help out. Dale loves his new garage and has spent countless hours in there building shelves, a work bench, and organizing tools and toys.
We hope that this past year has been as good to all our friends and family as it has been for us. We feel so grateful for the blessings we have received this past year. Thank you to everyone for your love towards us. We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.


Love Dale, Amanda, Joy, Lucy, and Eli Rogers

"Love Song for a Baby" - by Marion Dane Bauer

This one's for you, Sarah!

"Your laughter was the sun. Your smile, the moon. Even your burps were bells, since we loved you."

"Round cheecks, a round tummy, a round little bottom all made us love you."

Firsts

Lots of firsts have happened these last couple of weeks. We spent our FIRST night in our FIRST home on October 15th. We signed the papers to close yesterday, the 28th. Eli sat up for the FIRST time on Friday, October 23rd. He is so close to crawling and gets around pretty good. Joy is beginning to put sounds together to read words and read her FIRST book on Sunday, October 25th. It was "Hop on Pop." Lucy doesn't have any "Firsts," but she's really picking up on knowing her shapes and colors. Today, she was pretending to be asleep in the car when I came home from running errands. At first she had me fooled, but then I heard hiccup....hiccup, and I saw her peek. So I carried her to bed and she ended up falling asleep for reals. Sweet! Lastly, we left all 3 kids with a babysitter (other than family) for the FIRST time and went out to eat for my Birthday. We've been pretty busy these last few weeks and still have a few boxes to unpack and pictures to put on the walls. We have awesome neighbors and are in a nice little neighborhood. We've gotten several plates of cookies and one of our neighbors brought us dinner on our first night in our home. We're pretty happy and look forward to making new friends here.

House Picture

Here are a couple of pictures of our new house. We might not have internet for a couple of days and we wanted to post some photos.

Moving Days

Last night was our LAST NIGHT in this trailer!!! We are locking in our interest rate today, since it is so increadibly low. We also got an awesome number for our appraisal, so we are way excited to not have to deal with mortgage insurance. YEAH!!! We are so excited to finally get into our first home.
Eli is also moving. On Monday, he decided to celebrate turning 6 months old by army crawling. So funny. He used to try to scoot around by using only his toes and he looked like a little caterpillar. He's rolling all over the place, too. He is the gruntiest little guy too, and lets you know he enjoys his dinner. He's a little chunklet.
Last night, when we were at the house, Lucy was looking at everything and just didn't get it. She said, "We have those marshmallows too. I have that dress. Daddy has that Bronco too." She doesn't realize that everything we have is at our new house. She thinks it's someone else's stuff and that they have the same things that we do. She cracks me up.

Building

By the end of today, our block wall should be finished, all doorknobs should be on, and all light switches and outlets should be on the walls. The carpet, which is the last thing to go in, is supposed to be put down next Wednesday. I just got the keys to our house today. Yeah! It's crazy to think that it could be finished in one week. I'll post pics of our home soon.
Something else that is exciting is the spire and the Angel Moroni were put on the temple a few days ago. You can find pics of this event if you go to: http://www.ldschurchtemples.com/gilavalley/construction/

I love being able to drive past the temple every day and to see its progress. It's just beautiful. One can feel the excitement in this valley for the temple, especially when it is mentioned at church. Now we can drive literally 6 minutes, instead of 3 hours, to the temple.

Help from Big Sister

About a week ago we began feeding Eli baby ceral. Last night it was Lucy turn to feed her brother. Both Joy and Lucy love to feed there brother it is like having a real life baby doll.

FIRSTS

Eli got his first hair cut last week. His hair was about 3 inches long on top and was driving Dale crazy, so Eli got a hair cut. Eli was very calm a which made this an easy process. He looks older now.

Joy went to her first day of Kindergarten. She was so excited I am not sure she slept much the night before. Joy loved kindergarten and could not stop talking about it.

Here is a photo of Lucy and her cousin Gavin. Lucy and Gavin played well together
for the first time. Gavin got to come over when everyone elso was at school and these cousins had a great time together.

A very busy July!

Jan holding Arlee and Eli the day before the 4th of July. Eli definitely weighs more than Arlee. I think he passed her up when he was 2 months old and she was 5 months old!

Last week, I met DeAnn, Mason, and Justin in Holbrook at Grandma and Grandpa Roger's house. These kids had fun playing together, making messes together, and getting cleaned up together. It's pretty crazy when you put 3 two year olds together in one small house with a LOT of sewing stuff. This is Mason, Joy, Lucy, and Justin in Grandpa's new tub.

Eli is the cutest, smileyest little boy you've ever seen. He gave his first grunty little laugh at in Holbrook when I was playing with him at Grandma's house.

These pics of the temple aren't that great, but here it is. The steeple you see is from the chapel they are building next to the temple. The walls are big stone slabs that are being trucked in. Half of the bottom level of the temple has the stone facing up. I've heard that the temple is ahead of schedule due to the lack of rain we've had here.

Finally, this is what our house looks like. The framing's up and the trusses should be up by the end of this week. We finished picking out everything, which is a very tedious job. I sure hope it turns out okay.

We have a garage...and a patio!!!

The foundation for our house was poured on the Thursday before the 4th. The garage and patio were poured last week some time. On Friday, Dale's day off, we ran from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. trying to figure out everything we want in our house. We went to Home Depot 3 times!There are sooo many options and choices to be made. We had to figure out our interior and exterior paint colors, stain color for cabinets, countertop color, marble color for the bathrooms, and the list goes on and on. Not only do we get to choose all of these colors, but we need to make sure they don't clash. It's a lot of fun, but definitely a lot of work-especially with kids.
Last week we went to Sierra Vista and went swimming in their awesome swimming pool at The Cove. We met Flint and Jan there, and Cooper and Joy were in heaven swimming together. Lucy loved playing with the tubes and Eli fell asleep in the warm pool. It was a fun and much needed trip out of town.
Well, Eli's screaming his head off. That's the update for now. The house should be framed this week. Yeah!

Smiles, kids, and house

Eli is happy little boy. He has recently started smiling. He has not laughed yet but he getting ready to. He had his two month vistit a couple of weeks ago and he now weighs 13 lbs he is getting big fast.

On Sunday everyone wore Red, White, and Blue here is a picture of the kids. Joy is very excited to ride her bike in the 4th of July parade again this year.

Here is an updated picture of our house. They are pouring the foundation today. We can't wait to see it next week when they start framing then we will really be able to visualize it. We met our neighbors behind us yesterday they seem really friendly for cows.

Exciting news

On June 10 2009 we met with our builder and signed a contract to have our house built. The contract states that the builder has 120 days to have our house completed. So we should be moving into our home on or before Oct 10, 2009. We are so excited for this event in our lives. We have waited along time for this day to come and it appears the wait was worth it our builder has come down 30K since we spoke with him in January. We now feel very comfortable with the cost of our house. We wanted to go take a picture of our lot before anything began on it to follow it through the stages. However when we arrived at the lot our builder had all ready begun preparing the lot. We were ecstatic to find him already there working on our house.

Eli's Baby Blessing

On Sunday May 7,2009 Eli was blessed. Here is a couple of pictures of Eli all dressed up before church. The second picture is of Amanda's younger brother David and his wife Lacy . A lot of family and friends came to support us for this event. To all those that came thank you. After the blessing we cooked hamburgers at Isasc's house. We had a very enjoyable weekend with our families.

Big Guy and Pineapple Princess

Here is Joy all dressed up for her dance recital. She preformed Pineapple prinecess. She was very cute and did an awesome job.

Here is a couple of pictures of our big guy. As you can tell he does not miss a meal. Eli is a very happy baby and very easy going, he even tolorates his sisters when they are smothering him with love.

Family Pictures

My brother Flint came to town to take pictures at the dance studio. He took time out of his busy schedule to take our family pictures. He did a phenomenal job as always. If any one needs family pictures taken or any other special event photographed I highly recommend my brother.

Happy Mothers Day

Happy Mothers Day to all mothers and grandmothers out there. We would not be who we are today without our mothers. Thank you for all you have put up with throughout the years. Now some pictures from the last couple of weeks.


Here is a picture of the moon taken on Mt. Grarahm this last week. Little Lucy loves the moon she never goes outside with out looking for the moon and is quick to point it out to everyone.

Here a picture of or little boy Eli. Eli still sleeps alot but also is having longer periods were he is awake. He has some awesome big blue eyes. His sisters still love him and get exited to hold him and look at him.

When you have a new baby your older children grow up so fast. Lucy did her own hair for this picture. Lucy now loves to ride her trike. She got it for Christmas and has not rode it since then. About a week ago she decided she wanted to ride her trike and loves it now. She gets really excited when daddy tells her she is big girl when she rides her trike. Joy decided she was ready to ride her bike with out training wheels about a week ago. Dale had tried to teach her a while ago and she was not ready. This time Joy decided she was ready. She got her bike out sat on it pushed and started riding . She instantly starting riding as if she had always known how to do it. We will have to take some more pictures of our big girls and boy soon to share with all.

Proud Big Sisters

The girls got better and got to hold there new brother. Joy was very exicted and held him for about an hour. She had fun look at him, giving him his binkie, talking to Eli, and touching his hair. Lucy did not quite know what to think. After lucy held him we ate dinner. Eli was sitting in the living room. Lucy left the table and went in to the living room. Amanda followed and found Lucy was trying to pickup her brother. We are going to have have to watch her around him.

Welcome Home Eli and Amanda

Amanda and Eli came home from the hospital today. At about 11:30 I dropped Joy and Lucy off at Amanda's Visiting teachers house and went to pick up Amanda and Eli. Both of the girls were coughing and run low grade fevers so we went and ran several errands and let Amanda and Eli sleep. The girls got to stand at the door of our room and look in at Eli. Lucy and Joy still call him baby Buck, everyone else can call him buck as well. I think that is a nick name that will stick for a while. As soon as the girls get better they want to hold there brother. Lucy is fascinated by her brother. Joy of course has 10000 questions to ask. We are all glad to be home and together as a family.

Happy Birthday!!!

Happy Birthday to my sisters -in-law Jenny and Cammie and to their mothers. They both share their Birthdays today with their moms. How funny is that! Special thanks to both of them for this last week. Thank you Cammie for taking Joy to the wedding. She had lots of fun hanging out with you. Thank you Jenny for taking care of the girls when we were in the hospital. We love you both!

Happy Easter

This morning the easter bunny came to our house and brought a very special gift.

Eli Rogers was born at 2:12 am this morning. He weighed 6lbs 13oz and was 19 inches long. This was a C section so all things considered this was our easiest baby to have. Amanda woke up at 11:30 and said her water had broke. We got up and packed and loaded the girls in the car. We dropped Joy and Lucy off at Isaac's house and wen to the hospital. In about an hour after arrival we had our little boy with us. Eli and Amanda are both doing very well. We are very greatful that Eli arrived to us safe. This is a wonderful Easter present to recieve. Special Thanks to Isaac and Jenny for watching our girls. I include some picture of the new little guy and of his proud big sisters.