The Hanson Crew

John and I will be traveling to Las Vegas tomorrow for the annual Maids Growth Summit until Sunday.  Look at that wonderful weather forecast!! And this is after a foot of snow just dropped in my yard.  This will be my first year attending the actual meetings and awards celebrations.  Gary and Sue will meet us there from AZ. and our sales manager Kelly will be coming with us too. This will be the first time our kids are staying with friends over the weekend instead of family.  Caleb and Jonathan are staying with my best friend Lisa and her boys.  Joshua is staying with my other good friend Jennie and her son Chancelor. Ashlyn gets to stay home (just like she does everyday), but gets to be spoiled by Grandma Peggy all weekend.  They plan to see a movie and go shopping.  It sounds like everyone is as excited as John and I.  I will post pics when we get home :)

 Kansas City got another storm this past week, which meant closing for The Maids again, school cancellation, and another foot of white powder!  It was a lot prettier this round because it was a wet snow that stayed on the trees.  It reminded us of Narnia.  Our wonderful neighbor plowed our street so I driveway and street were cleared early on.  The kids built an igloo and went sledding down our big neighborhood hill.  Today, they started a snowball fort...

Somewhere around 12-14" today.  We are supposed to get another 2-4" tonight.  School was cancelled today and is already cancelled tomorrow.  We closed the Maids both days as well, which is a scheduling nightmare and of course a payday too!  We thank God for our neighbor who plowed our driveway, along with half of the street and for a warm house to be in together today.  We have both worked alot this week at the Maids so this was great timing! The entire metro area is under a state of emergency until tomorrow at midnight.  It's crazy to watch the news to see how many drivers are stranded and how many exits are still closed.  We are planning to enjoy some homework and a movie tonight.

John's grandpa John Steiner made this ring many years ago and engraved John's grandparent's initials on the side. Sue stayed with John's grandma this past month when she had an ulcer on her leg and helped her pack many of things before going to an assisted living home in Grand Island, NE.  She gave John this ring when she came to Kansas City.  He is excited to have something memorable from his grandparents and looks forward to passing it on to one of our boys one day. He plans to wear it occasionally too.

We enjoyed the weekend with some good friends in Omaha this past weekend.  We planned the trip last fall and it surprised us that it fell over Valentine's weekend as well as President's Day weekend.  So we got another day to rest when we got home, which was wonderful.  We left Friday evening and headed to Mahoney State Park where we rented a nice cabin.  The McKinzies have a little boy named Landon and a daughter named Brooklyn who enjoyed it as much as our crew.  We played Sat at our huge ball pit/slide area, enjoyed ice skating, and painted some ceramics.  We headed to the Omaha Zoo on Sunday and then drove back to Kansas City.  It was a much needed, relaxing time together.  Here are a few pics from the trip...     We are excited about buying a Omaha Zoo membership while we were there this trip so we can drive up a couple more time this summer and go for free now :)  The membership includes free IMAX tickets too for all six of us, which

Grandma Sue came to visit KC from sunny AZ this past week for Rylee's birthday.  We spent some time with her together and then she spent some time on Sat making some fun Superhero sugar cookies.  Here are a few pics from her camera while they baked together.

We opened our Maids doors in early 2004.  The first doors we opened were on a retail strip in North Kansas City, hoping for good advertisement in a shopping area.  We ended up with a lot of parking tickets (2 hour parking outside our store), a big rent fee for the area/exposure, a huge open, empty store area with 2 small desks sitting in it, and the realization right away that we should have picked a warehouse location from the start. So after that lease was up, we moved farther down the road in North KC (most central place to the areas we go out and clean each day) to a small warehouse with a single car garage.  We actually could push 2 cars in which was great since we had doubled in size since we opened.  The office area was much more spacious and worked well for a sales person, financial person, and field mgr.  But we out grew that space quicker than the other. The place we are in now seemed huge when we moved in.  There was an open area for a break room, 5 offices, 2 bathrooms,

Thanks for reading!  To celebrate our 140,000th blog view, I thought we would share John's Watch D.O.G.S picture from January :)

The Maids surprised us with a small package yesterday - a Costa Rica 2013 travel guide, some fresh Costa Rica coffee, a fun bracelet, and a postcard.  Tickets have been bought and we have started our swimsuit shopping.  John and Ashlyn will be gone March 22nd through March 26th.  They are both very excited! Before that daddy/daughter trip, John and I get to enjoy The Maids Growth Summit in Las Vegas, Feb 28th - March 3rd.  This will be the first time our kids split up for overnights with different friends.  We are looking forward to that trip too :)

I decided to paint a red accent wall this weekend on a whim and fell in love with the apple red color right away (this looks more pink in the picture than it actually is).  But it didn't go well at all with the latte color next to it.  The front living room is a deep yellow with red accents so that is why I chose the red accent wall (you would see it from that room).  So because it didn't flow well in the entry way next to the neutral tan wall, I decided to paint the other two walls the red too.  There wasn't much wall too paint because the entry is so big into that front living room.  I'm thinking I need to find a clearance rug now.  Here is the end result... Goodbye neutral...hello apple red!

We enjoyed the Superbowl yesterday with Aunt Carol, Uncle Chris, Rylee, and Molly. We hadn't hung out with them in a long time. The kids made up a great menu of football snacks and decor. We enjoyed hot dogs, chili, nachos bar, chips and a lot of dips, some desserts, and some drinks. We never made our homemade popcorn, which was on the list too. It was a great night together! Molly is sure getting big quick.