Smiles and laughs!!!

Our girls love to smile and laugh! Here are a few pictures of both of them (Olivia is 12 weeks old and Madalyn is 2 1/2!

This picture shows so well what our sweet girl's personality is like! She loves to be silly and laugh her big belly laugh! And she's starting to be a little more into having her picture taken (as long as she can look at it on the camera after it's done)!
Sweet Olivia--snuggled up on her boppy! (Sorry the picture's turned-can't seem to get it to turn right)

Lost pictures

Well, it looks like it's going to be a bit tougher to fill in pictures from the previous months, as we were planning to do over Christmas break! Our hard drive crashed near the end of the break and we brought it in to a computer place to see if any of the files (pictures and videos especially) could be recovered. Unfortunately, it's completely dead and there's no way to get back anything that was on there. Which means that we lost hundreds of pictures and videos from the last 6+ months. Thankfully it was not longer than that because this is actually a new hard drive we bought in the spring (they are coming out to replace it) and we transferred everything from the old hard drive onto an external drive when we switched. So, hopefully everything is still on there with no problems. We did upload some pictures to snapfish and shutterfly recently, so there are some that we can probably download and we will post them as we find them--however, we did lose a lot from Olivia's first 2 months! :( Too bad we weren't better about updating this blog with pictures! Definitely a goal for the new year!! And we've learned our lesson the hard way about backing up your hard drive on a regular basis.

P.S. If any of you have pictures of us or the girls from the last 6 months, we would love to get copies or make a CD of the pictures to put back on our computer so we can get them saved and printed out! We definitely need to be better about actually printing pictures on a regular basis! You can also email them to us as attachments.

Christmas Eve

We spent Christmas eve celebrating our Savior's birth at our church's candlelight service, which was beautiful! Ben's mom and stepdad John were out here for a week celebrating Christmas with us, so they joined us along with Jen's uncle Bruce! Here are some shots all dressed up at church!!

Sweet Olivia at 2 months old! She has recently learned to smile and coo, and just learned to laugh this past weekend on the 27th of December! It's just the most precious sound! We'll post some video of that later for the grandparents to see/hear (if we can get the video to post).

This was take #3, trying to get a good shot of the girls!! Olivia finally cooperated!! :)

Madalyn absolutely loves to dance, especially when she's wearing a dress made for twirling!

Daddy read the Christmas story from Luke in the Bible on Christmas Eve, while we acted it out with our Nativity pieces. Madalyn loved hearing about Baby Jesus!

Olivia 7-8 weeks old!!

Olivia had her first smile at about 6-7 weeks. She's a bit more serious than her sister was at this age, but when she does smile, it lights up her whole face! She saved her first real smile for her big sister...she's just fascinated by Madalyn and follows her with her eyes everywhere she goes!! She's very alert and loves to look around at all the interesting surroundings! She also loves to be held...she's such a snuggle bug as you can tell in the picture below!! Olivia all dressed up for our Mom's Club Christmas Party - isn't she precious??

Waaaayyy behind.....

Well, we had such good intentions of staying on top of it with this website, but life is so busy this time of year, especially with a newborn who loves to be held all the time and a super busy 2 1/2 year old. So, instead of trying to play catch-up, we'll just post some recent pictures and then try to work backwards over Christmas break! Looking forward to Ben having off for 2 weeks and his mom and stepdad, John, will be in town for a week over Christmas, which will be a lot of fun!

These pictures were taken up at Jen's mom's house this past weekend. We awoke to about 5-6" of snow on Sunday morning at her house, so Madalyn had fun playing in the snow. They are now up to at least 10" up there--however, we've just gotten a few inches here or there down where we are and it's pretty much gone now--although the rest of the area is hit with quite a bit of snow.

This is a picture of my mom's Golden Retriever puppy, Brody! He loved playing in the snow!

More hospital pictures of Olivia

Here are a few more pictures of Olivia at the hospital on our last day!

All dressed up and snoozing as we waited for the photographer to come take hospital pictures!

Waiting to go home!!



So tiny!! Ben wanted to show how tiny she was by showing her size in comparison to a pen. :)

Olivia's birth day - October 21st, 2008!

Olivia Grace Dotson was born on October 21st, 2008, at 12:55pm by C-Section. She cried as she was delivered and as they were working on her, but within a few minutes, she settled right down and almost looked like she was going to sleep - a mellow, laidback baby even from birth! And she loves her sleep! :)


Olivia weighed 8 lbs ,4 oz and was 19 1/2" long at birth!! She had a head full of soft, dark hair with a little waviness to it. What a precious, beautiful blessing she is!
Madalyn came over in the afternoon to meet her baby sister for the first time and she was very excited!! She wasn't quite sure what to think at first but she really wanted to hold her!! Our family of four!!

Madalyn brought a special gift that she picked out herself for baby Olivia, a sweet bunny rabbit with blankie! She was very excited to give it to Olivia!

Baby Olivia had a few special gifts for Madalyn, too - a special t-shirt which has Madalyn's name and says "I'm the big sister", as well as a special doll. This way she could have her own baby to take care of when Mama is taking care of Olivia - the doll cries and coos, drinks from a bottle and even wets her diaper. Unfortunately when we got the doll, there were only boy dolls left, so we thought we could just change the blue clothes to pink and then she'd have a girl doll. Little did we know that the dolls are anatomically correct - definitely all boy! :) So, it's a little different than what we were hoping, but she still loves her doll and will put him in Olivia's swing, car seat, etc and burp him, feed him, just like we do with Olivia.