Rockin' the Mullet!

I just thought I'd post a newish photo of Caleb since these little guys change so fast. He's entering the bald stage, but he hasn't quite lost all of the baby hair yet. He's all business in front and a party in the back! Rock it baby!

Happy Birthday Braden!

Braden turned 6 on Saturday while we were camping, so we had a little party for him when we got back. Mom was exhausted and still sick, so Safeway made him a very colorful Madagascar cake. He loved his presents and says he thinks he "growed" bigger. We love you Braden and are so proud of the sweet little man you've become!

Labor Day Weekend

We went camping over Labor Day Weekend. Jared and I were both coming down with horrible colds, but this is the vacation that our boys most look forward to, so we sucked it up and went anyway. Andrew's very favorite thing about camping is the camp-fire. It's the first thing he wanted to do when we got there. I don't know why I didn't get a picture of him by it, but oh well. My very helpful uncle Jim decided to give Andrew and Braden a tutorial in fire building. Apparently I am too strict with the fun stuff, so now I'm going to have to hide the matches. Before then neither of them had ever been allowed to even hold a match. I guess I'm a sheltering mom, but is it so horrible to make my life easier by putting dangerous things off-limits? The second favorite pastime for the boys was target shooting with BB guns. Yes, I allowed my 6 and 8 year old boys to play with guns. Take that, Uncle Jim. It caused me much stress, but I know I was allowed to shoot BB guns when I was barely strong enough to hold them up and I survived. My mom was from a tiny rural town and things like guns and campfire and driving trucks and tractors were just not a big deal. If you were tall enough to do it physically, they let you do it. Especially if it lightened someone else's load. Here are my little marksmen:


We took a nice little hike up to Windy Point. It's a short enough hike that the little kids can do it and it still has a nice view at the end. Jared put Caleb in our baby backpack and I was able to enjoy walking without my little sidekick. He's almost too small to go in there, but we just propped him up with a blanket and he slept almost the whole time. Nice.





It was a fun weekend. Andrew's already asking when the next Labor Day is.

We Moved!

This is my latest excuse for not blogging. We've been busy! Finally, we're free from our tiny two-bedroom prison. Unfortunately, we can't get a loan to buy a home until Jared's practice has been open for two years, so we went hunting for a rental and found this cute little house only two blocks away from where we were before. So the kids don't have to change schools or even wards. Pretty cool. I'm just excited to finally have a back yard for the kids to play in.

I promised to post some pics of Katie's birthday, I can't believe how long it's taken me to do this. I had forgotten how hard it is to have a cranky baby. Caleb is as bad as Andrew was, maybe worse in some ways. I can almost never put him down, and when I can, it seems like there are a hundred more important things to do than blog - like laundry and cooking and trying to put the chaos in order. Caleb even sleeps with me at night. He wakes up every half hour if I try to make him sleep in his crib. Unfortunately, he was trained that way. He slept on my chest for the 1st two weeks of his life. At first it was because I couldn't get out of the recliner without help, but after the first week it was because I was too tired and weak to get up four times a night. Even after I made it back into a bed, he had to join me. I've decided that I'll have to be one of those mom's that carries her baby around in a sling all day long. He sleeps well in it and it frees up my hands. We'll see how much my back suffers when he's no longer only 8 pounds.

Anyway, now for the purpose of this post: My sweet little princess turned 3! Katie requested a Tinkerbell cake and it's a miracle I managed even a simple fondant cake. I made a marshmallow fondant since the store-bought stuff is nasty and the real kind had too many ingredients I didn't have and I didn't have time to go to a store. The kids loved this stuff. It pretty much just tastes like marshmallows. Katie is into all things princess, so she got a princess scooter, a dress, and a Thumbelina doll. What a happy girl. We love our Katie, her life is a rollercoaster. She's spreading sunshine and cuteness one minute but the next thing you know she's storming a tantrum like you've never seen before. Here's to another year sweet thing!

I finally found the computer!

Okay, so I know it's been forever since I posted (February? I can't believe what a slacker I've been) but I owe y'all an update and we'll start with baby. This is Caleb Thatcher Olson, and we're lucky we have him. If you've already heard the birth story, feel free to scroll on down. On the morning of June 11th, I woke up at 5:30am feeling labor pains. I knew it was the real thing, but was expecting it to drag out until the afternoon like Katie's, so I picked up a book to read and started recording the times of the contractions. By about 7am I thought maybe this might happen sooner than I expected, since the pains were getting intense. I woke up Jared and called my Mom to come watch the kids. Unfortunately, my mom was out walking but my dad said he expected her any minute and would send her right over. No big deal, I thought. The contractions were not that close together. I decided that since we were waiting on my mom anyway, I might as well take a shower. OOPS. While I was sitting in a chair reading a book, the contractions were ten minutes apart, but after walking up the stairs to wake Jared then standing in the shower, I decided I had to go NOW. So I hurried out of the shower and into some clothes and called my parents again. I told my dad that he had to leave a note for mom and get here right away because the we were leaving. Lucky for me that my parents live practically up the street from me. We called the doctor's office on the way and warned him that this labor was progressing very fast (of course they didn't take us seriously, they never do.)

Anyway, so we finally get to the hospital and I can't even walk anymore, they're coming so fast. It was all dramatic like in the movies: Jared pulls up in front of the valet parking and hops out calling for a wheelchair. It was kind of funny in hindsight. So he gets me up to maternity and the nurse is calmly asking me to put on a gown and give a urine sample while I'm thinking -oh crap, I don't know if I can even stand up to take my clothes off! Well I managed it, but after I got on that little bed in the triage room, I wasn't moving again. The nurse started trying to put the little monitors on me and stuff, but then I think I started freaking her out (seriously, the contractions were right on top of each other) she just threw the straps back on the tray and went to get the charge nurse. The charge nurse comes in and checks me to find that I'm fully dilated and my bag of water is bulging. She said she needed to get me into a delivery room and I told her "fine, but I'm not getting off this bed!" They had to wheel me in there and take the bed that was in there out - it felt like it took forever. All this time they've been trying to get my doctor over - it was now after 8:00, so the on call doc told the hospital to call my regular doctor, who told them to call the on-call doctor back because he was driving his girls to camp and wouldn't be back until 9:00. I just wanted to murder both of them because my baby was COMING and they were arguing like kids over who has to do the dishes. The nurses were telling me not to push and so I wanted to murder them too. Anyway, after about 10 minutes, my water broke and I felt some relief until the nurse checked me and said "uh oh." Those are two syllables you never want to hear when in labor. She said that she felt hands and cord and I was ready to freak out, but luckily the doctor walked in right then and about ten seconds later they were wheeling me into the operating room.

Those who have experienced a planned C-Section will tell you how it's exciting and you get to enjoy the birth of your baby with no fatigue and no pain. Well, the emergency kind is not so exciting. There were about seven people handling my body at the same time - shaving, scrubbing, needle poking, oxygen masking, ultra-sounding, and who knows what else. It was madness. Doc was manning the ultrasound and I was nervous because I kept expecting to hear a baby heartbeat but didn't. I was put out a few seconds later though and woke up in a recovery room feeling nearly dead. If you've seen the pictures Jared sent around (without my permission, mind you), you probably noted that I looked almost dead too - and that was 3 hours after I woke up. This is getting long, so I'll finish with a truncated version of the rest: I had to get a blood transfusion as a result of an excessively bloody surgery, felt much better with some blood in my body even if it wasn't mine, got released and moved into my mom's house for 2 weeks where I lived in a recliner and let other people do nearly everything for me, then I moved back home (the recliner had to come with me) and I am now trying to get back into the rhythm of mommy life.

Now for a quick summary of some other things that have happened since February:
Jared and I each lost a grandparent this spring, which was sad. We did gain a sister though shortly thereafter (yay!) We look forward to getting to know Laura.
The boys were both in baseball (well, tee-ball for Braden). Braden loved it, Andrew started to get bored. I finally got released as Primary President, Hooray! What else . . . Oh-a big one- Andrew turned 8 in May, so he got baptized and got to join the cub scouts. Can you believe he's grown up so much? I feel old. Speaking of which, I turned 30 in June and Jared hit 33 last week. Katie's
3rd birthday is actually today, but we're not celebrating it until tomorrow since Jared had scouts tonight. Hopefully I can post some pics after the festivities, but I'm going to end this now or it'll go on forever.



She misses being the baby!

"Look mom, I maked up!"

Okay, so a few nights ago, I went to the Fabric store with my mom and was out until about 9pm. When I got home, the house was blissfully quiet. "The kids are asleep?" I asked Jared. He said that he had not heard any noise upstairs for at least half an hour, so he was assuming they were all asleep. That's exactly why I stayed out so late, so whoopee, I was going to be able to just kick back and relax for a couple of hours. I had just sat down when I hear Katie coming down the stairs, saying "Mommy come home? Mommy, look at Katie. I maked up!" I thought she said "I waked up," and was preparing myself for a long stay in her bedroom, but I soon came to see the evidence that miss Katie had been doing anything but sleeping. She came up to me and her face was covered in makeup foundation. At first, I thought I'd just go after her with a washcloth, and save the bath for morning, but upon closer inspection, I realized it was all over her hair . . . and her hands . . . and her feet. Now I see that a bath is necessary, so I take off her pajamas to find that she has the foundation covering the entire front half of her body. I don't know why she did that. maybe she thought it was lotion? Anything she could reach was covered. Ugh. It was funny and a little bit cute when I thought it was just her hands and her feet. You know, it was one of those moments where you take a picture and try not to let them know you think it was cute so you can lecture them about not doing it again. After I took off the pajamas, I was over thinking it was cute. It got worse when I took her upstairs to put her in the tub. I walked by my bedroom on the way to the bathroom and realized she'd done a makeover on my bed too. Oh, goody.

I always brag that my kids have never really been the types to get into things. I've never had to be careful about keeping things out of reach before. I pitied my sisters and sister-in laws, but only now am I beginning to understand. Katie has developed an obsession with lotions and makeup lately, so I should have seen this coming.

Baby News

Hey, if anyone's still out there I have news! I know I haven't blogged for a month so I won't be surprised if you've all given up on me. I had my ultrasound today so now I know which baby things to keep and which boxes I can get rid of (this is my last one, remember? I try to remind Jared every day so he can get used to the idea). So, see for yourself:

It's A Boy!!!

Andrew was a little disappointed. He wanted another baby sister. Braden is just thrilled to be able to tell everyone he sees, "guess what! It's a boy!" Katie still doesn't really get it. She saw the pictures and said, "I have a baby in my tummy too. I want to take a picture." Jared and I didn't care. We knew we'd be happy either way. We thought it would make things easy to have another girl. It would have been nice to be able to split the room sharing evenly among other things, but honestly I'm kind of relieved. I'm not a fan of drama, so it will be nice to only have one drama queen when they get older. Actually, Katie's a drama queen now so I can't even picture how bad it's going to get when she gets to the tween ages. I'm not looking forward to the name searching though. Boy names have always been harder for me. But I'm excited.

The ultrasound went well. Everything seems to be normal and they put the due date at June 17th. I don't like the 4D imaging at all. It made the baby look creepy - like those emaciated infants you see in the commercials that want you to donate money to the starving people in Africa. I'll post a few pics, but I apologize for the quality. I just took pictures of the print-out she gave me, so it is what it is.