the baby came .. on monday

the baby in tiina's belly decided to make an appearence! we got home from taavi's baptism around 7:30pm sunday night. my parent's had been nervous to leave town because tiina was due on the 30th and we were going to stay with eeli when the labor started. well, less than 2 hours after we returned, tiina informed us that her water had broken...about an hour later (after a nice brisk walk with my mom around the 4 square blocks in our neighborhood) tiina and teemu were at the hospital. my mom got up with eeli after he woke extra early monday morning (5:17am) which ironically was the start of tiina's 15 minutes of hard (drug-free) pushing! this little girl was born at 5:34am -- just 7 hours after the water broke. we were all so excited to meet her. she is very sweet and when we are all in the room you can see her listening to the noise as if she recognizes all of our voices. we are all pretty smitten. you can see more pictures of her here -- with her big brother eeli. her name is SILLA and i just can't get enough of her!

baptism of taavi

this weekend, we had a shower & baptism for my cousin, taavi. i got to play santa claus and bring chad and mimmu the presents to open next. in between my job, while the present was being opened, i would lean down and check on taavi and talk to him until they needed a new gift to open. after the presents (and the cake) my mom and dad, who are his american god parents, gave taavi a silver baby rattle as a baptism gift. taavi was a really good boy during the ceremony, listening with wide eyes and even smiling. it was my papa's job to throw the water from the ceremony into the air to symbolize taavi growing to be a big and healthy boy. now my mom and i just need to start practicing our finnish so that we can speak finnish with taavi as he grows older....

triking the parkway

sunday morning in duluth

chipped-buck-teeth, mcDonald's batman-toy and all.... (oops, spiderman toy)

free first saturday

this saturday i met the heydt-kids at the walker art center for the family free first saturday festivities. we had a lot of fun making story books! my mom helped me make a story about wallE (of course) and tenzin made a story about her and her purse and dora and a bunch of other fun stuff. we used pencils and crayons and scissors (my favorite!) and paper and a glue stick (my second favorite) to make the books. afterwards, me and tenzin watched a short "cross-stitch" movie while our parents chatted and waited to watch a 3D movie about the sun. we watched the movie in a small theater and the lights went out and the 'thins' were coming out at us! wow. we sure had a lot of fun together -i can't wait to have another play date with tenzin!

wallE

i love wallE....and robots in general. i build wallE and different versions of robots all day long - out of play-doh, legos, blocks, paper and i've even started DRAWING them (drawings to come soon!) and despite the fact that i like robots so much these days, i've also made the realization that i can like more than one thing at a time: "i like wallE and lightning mcQueen!" wow!

(my mom's having trouble embedding vimeos into this post... will try again later...)

my mom thinks i look old....

my mom's friend, john...

my mom's college friend, john, came with me and my parents on our recent trip to duluth. he sent us these pictures that he took of me in one of my favorite places at my grandma and grandpa's house. when he asked me what this little place in under the counter was called, i told him "it's my workshop"