Just a reminder...

I have actually started posting (finally!) over at the new blog, Four Cheery Os.  So if you want to continue reading about our adventures, you need to go follow that one now! :)  I won't be posting on this one any more.

A New Chapter

Teddy is here! Theadora Joy Olsen was born at 9:44 am on February 7th, 2010. She weighed 8 pounds, three ounces, and was 21 inches long. Technically she's a preemie as she was three weeks and one day early, and anything earlier than three weeks is premature. But it was only one day, whereas Ru was 6 weeks early. What a difference those three weeks make! Teddy is fine and healthy and didn't need any assistance breathing, swallowing, etc. It appears she'll be able to nurse just fine, and we were all able to stay together in our room in the Newberg hospital. Except Ru of course, she went and stayed with Grandma Judy for the three days we were in the hospital.

Of course, this means there are now FOUR cheery Os in our family, so the title of this blog, Three Cheery Os, is now out of date. So I have decided to close this chapter and this blog, and begin a new one with the more appropriate title. If you're a follower here, you may want to jump on over to http://fourcheeryos.blogspot.com/ and begin following that one. If you generally get this because I email it to you, don't worry, I'll send posts from the new blog as well. Cya there!

Toys!

Daddy was playing with Ruthie in her room, and she climbed into the (usually empty) toy box and decided she wanted ALL of her stuffed animals in there with her.

She loves her stuffed animals, and spends much of the day either hugging or carrying around an animal or two, or caring for her many baby dolls. She's gonna make a great big sister soon! Look at how grown up she is looking these days!

Of course, she paused to hug several of them, and you can see how she ended up covered in animals in this pic:
Here's another hugging pic if you need some help figuring out where the girl is in the pic above. :)
While I'm posting, another fun story demonstrating what a great kid she is growing up to be...

Brian hurt his back last week, and has been trying to get it better for days. One thing that tends to help is if he lies on the floor with his feet up on a chair. He was doing that in Ruthie's room when she was having a rather fussy night (she's sick, he's broken, and I'm 36 weeks preggers. We are quite the pathetic family right now...) and did NOT like Daddy doing that. "Daddy up! Daddy up!" she fussed at him from my lap where I was trying to comfort her and explain that Daddy's back was hurt. She finally understood that he had an ouchy. Of course, the only time she's had an ouchy back was when her excema got so bad.

So her little toddler brain lined up with her big toddler heart, and she slid off my lap to help her Daddy. "Lotion!" she said, and grabbed her lotion off daddy's desk. She took it in to him and put it on his chest, gave him a pat pat on the tummy and said "all better!" Then she came back to me looking quite satisfied with herself. It was the sweetest thing, that's my girl!

A beautiful day!

It was really nice out today, so Ru and I bundled up and went outside to play. She mostly played in the garden, here she's (of course) showing me a cool rock she found.

She also loves playing with the "duckies" in the garden. They are resin so a bit heavy, but not so bad as stone or cement. We only let her play with the babies, and she enjoys carrying them from the garden to the porch, and then back to be with the mama and daddy ducks.

Note the baby duck on the porch behind her, she's headed back to the garden to get the other one.

Those of you that know Ruthie well at all will recognize an odd phenomenon in this set of pictures. Ru is wearing a hat! I haven't been able to get her to keep a hat on her head since last winter. I'm not sure if it was just cool enough, or if she liked the color, or if it was just because I told her how cute she was with it on about ten times, but for whatever reason she kept it on this time. We played in the van for a while and it was warm enough in there that we both took our hats off, but she didn't want to put it back on afterwards. I figured I'd take what success I could get. :)

Christmas Eve with the Maxwells

For the first time in many years, we actually got together with my family within a few days of Christmas. Actually, we got together Christmas eve. It was Ru's first big Christmas present opening celebration, and she had lots of fun tearing the paper off!
Sammy guarded the wrapping paper while Ru and I investigated her new Duplo bus set. (John's girlfriend Misty is sitting next to me)

Ru says opening presents is "fun!"

She also thinks just about anything with a lens should work like our camcorder, with a flip out view screen she can use as a "meer" to see herself. We had a hard time convincing her this particular camera doesn't have a flip out screen.

We just did finger food type stuff for dinner, which was nice because I didn't have to cook. It also helped me to not overeat, as this pregnancy I'm having more trouble with my feet and ankles swelling, and a lot of our snacks were pretty high sodium. The chocolate covered mini cream puffs from costco were pretty yummy tho! Ru enjoyed the cheese and crackers, and the grapes off the fruit tray.

We got lots of good gifts, and hopefully everyone liked the gifts we gave them, too. Ru and I did miss the Church service, But Daddy went and ran sound and said the service was nice, hopefully we can go next year. In the meantime we'll use our nativity sets and books to make sure Ru knows what the real meaning of Christmas is: God's gift of his son to mankind.

The "Big Girl Room"

In anticipation of our fourth "Cheery O" joining us, we're trying to get Ru moved out of the nursery and into a new big girl room. Since I know she's quite the girly girl, but I can't hardly stand to paint an entire room pink (I, personally, amd still not not a girly girl) I compromised and painted a mural on the wall.

Two, actually, altho the big tree isn't done yet, I haven't decided if I'm going to paint more, or do something a bit more three dimensional. Right now there are silver and hot pink glittery snowflakes hanging from the branches, altho I hadn't put them up yet when I took the pics.

I hope to eventually add some animals or something, but I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out as is. :)

Letter to Santa

Ru is really getting into the whole Christmas thing. She loves the lights, the trees, and she REALLY loves Santa. Well, mostly, she kinda thinks most snowmen at the stores are Santa, too, but it's the same idea. ;) She gets excited when she spots him in the store windows or the big inflatable ones in ppl's yards.

We've been watching the Father Christmas video with her sometimes, and the other night she was sitting on Brian's lap, watching it for probably the third time. If you haven't seen it, it's really cute. Santa tells us what he does for the rest of the year. He goes on vacation, then comes home to piles and piles of letters to deal with. While she was watching, she grabbed a notepad from Brian's desk and wanted to color. Brian handed her a brown crayon and she proceeded to

scribble back and forth while she watched. This isn't anything particularly unusual. the surprising part was when Santa came home from vacation and started reading the kids letters, Ru took her scribbled paper and stood up on Brian's lap, reached over to the monitor and started batting the paper against the screen. She kept repeating "Santa, Santa, Santa" as she did this, so Brian and I concluded she has written her very first letter to Santa Claus, and was trying to get it to him thru the screen. I had the camera handy, so I snapped a quick picture. Because of the nature of flat screen monitors, you can't tell it's even on, so you'll just have to trust me that she was banging it against the poor Santa's face trying to get his attention.

I was all set to "engineer" the letter to Santa thing, I have a postcard I picked up at Macy's already addressed to Santa I was going to let her color on. This letter is obviously MUCH more authentic, I just hope the good St. Nick's language understanding magic extends to reading scribbles from toddlers. And don't worry, I already included a note to him asking for the letter back, because this one obviously needs to end up in the scrapbook!