March 8th 2010

You will be hearing a lot from me from me for the next couple of days. My mom is on a mini-vacation of sorts. She will have plenty of time to help me blog! Granted, a lot of blogging for us is mostly days in a row rather then more than once a day, so it shouldn’t be so bad!

My new friends arrived a few days ago. Mom ordered them from the Build-a-Bear website. It was difficult not to sneak in a few things of my own, but I resisted! The bill was hefty enough!

This is a photo of Fleur and our new friends, Texas the longhorn steer and Yellowstone the bison. Fleur is no longer the only cow in our hug. Fleur is speaking to them in cow and trying to make them feel welcome. They have been bonding over their horns! Until she mentioned it, I never realized that Fleur was the only plushie here with horns! Apparently there is some kind of upkeep! I am glad that I am a simple bear!

Mom and Jefferson, our new Clydesdale friend, had a conversation and he agreed to take me for a little ride. Mom did not let me go very far, because I did not have a saddle or a helmet or anything to keep me safe. But it was very fun! I never knew how hard it would be to stay upright! We have agreed to more lessons after Mom finds my English riding habit and makes some kind of saddle and bridle. Washington, another of our four-footed horse friends, has both, but the bridle does not fit Jefferson and the saddle does not fit me! The saddle will take a little more work, but Mom has some ideas for the bridle. She says outfitting Jefferson and I for a ride will be as close as she will get to outfitting a horse and a rider for a while, so she will take what she can get. I will keep you all updated!

For comparison, this is the newest photo of our four legged horse family. Harrison, Strawberry, Jefferson, Zelda, Washington, Sarina, and Pirouette all have been getting along. He helps the boy and girl balance in this family! The girls can’t gang up on the boys quite so much right now. For a while, Harrison was the only boy pony and the girls used to pick on him all the time! Now they are Jefferson is at least a good two or three inches taller then the other horses, therefore is much better suited for allowing me to ride! Charlotte, my giraffe friend, is still bigger though, and she makes sure that Jefferson knows that!

I have been enjoying reading my twitter page and chatting on the Bear Place lately. It is very nice to talk to like-minded plushies out there. Some of them go on grand adventures! While I would like to go outside more often, I am not so sure about all of the adventures! I am very much a home bear! Teddy and Nibs go to Las Vegas and Los Angeles! The green frog from the Unexpected Life of the the Green Frog goes to all sorts of places in Europe! Hm. I will have to ponder this—maybe I should start more locally! Hm, hm, hm!!

March 6th 2010

All of my new friends have arrived! I will write about them another day, because yesterday, I helped Mom make supper! Her parents are gone on vacation, so we are in charge of all food preparation! We made a night of it. Milton, Robinson, Foster, and I went into the kitchen to watch some TV while Mom watched the dinner. Since I chose last time, we let Mom pick this time. She picked Dave Matthews Band’s Live at Folsom Field. We’ve seen it many times, but it makes her happy!

We have chose our places on the table. We would usually sit on the ground, but the TV in the kitchen is high up in a cabinet and Mom wants us to get the best view!

Here we are watching Dave Matthews Band. It’s Mom’s favorite band!

We are multi-tasking here. Mom is making two of her favorite meals from when she was a little girl. One she called hot-dish, which is made of noodles, hamburger, and tomatoes. The other she called Spanish rice, which is made of rice, hamburger, and tomatoes. The Spanish rice needs to cook in the oven.

Mom said it was very hot and I could only watch from a safe distance. She said that we didn’t have any oven mitts that would fit my hands to protect them from the heat. I still got to watch the water boil and make sure she noticed!

This is the hot-dish! I got to try some of this and it was very good. It made Mom very happy—she will have leftovers of both dishes throughout the week! Cooking was great fun! I hope Mom will let me help her again soon!

March 3rd, 2010

We are awaiting three new arrivals here this week. While browsing some of our Flickr friends’ photostreams, Mom discovered that Build-a-Bear has a longhorn cattle, a Clydesdale, and a buffalo (technically a bison!). She invited them all home to live with us. The longhorn cattle’s name is Texas, the Clydesdale’s name is Jefferson, and the buffalo’s name is Yellowstone. I will be sure to post pictures of them when they arrive.

Pirouette and Sarina, who have been getting along famously since Sarina’s arrival, have decided to come downstairs and wait for Jefferson’s arrival. They are anxious to greet him! They really would like Mom to invite a boy magical pony much like themselves home! All our boy four legged horses are ordinary horses! Strawberry is our other four legged magical pony girl. She decided that she would rather wait to meet the new boy until he got a bit better settled in. I think that’s a rational way—it’s very exciting to meet all these new plushies! Introducing him to our whole hug will take a while!

Fleur is also kind of excited. Until now, she has been the only cattle in our hug. While Yellowstone won’t be her exact species, buffalo are related to cattle. Texas will be a little bit closer. We’ll have to see who they want to hang out with. Fleur is fond of Shirley, Charlotte, and Chloe. Who knows if they will want to spend time with the girls!

They are supposed to arrive today via FedEx. I hope they come soon! I like meeting new friends!

February 26th, 2010

Today was very quiet. Mom had the day off, and she chose to spend most of it at home with us. We took a lot of naps, watched some TV, and got current with all of the blogs we read. Mom posted our first article on the Bear Place. We decided to write it on the TY Inc. company because Feddie, the bear who is in charge of the site, is a TY beanie baby. We hope everyone likes it! Mom is very nervous about it. She has not written anything that is not about trees, and nature and things like that in a long time. (That’s what she went to school for—nature-like things!) But now it is done and posted, so we can only hope that it goes over well.

Shirley has taken one of our new friends, Calla, under her guidance. Calla was worried that she was the only orange bear in our hug. Shirley told her while it doesn’t matter what color you are, we do have other orange bears, Azalea and Candace. It seemed to help her feel better. We’re all going to just have to try harder to help her feel at home here!

Caleb wants me to post a picture of him wearing his new Packers jersey. Mom found it at thrift store last week and it is perfectly his size! While Mom really isn’t into the Packers, all of us bears do often watch the games when they are on. Caleb is quite the Packers fan—even though a football is at least three times as big has he is! (We live in Wisconsin, where Packers and football are cultural institutions!) This is one of the first t-shirts that Caleb really likes! He was awfully fond of all the the BAB clothes that they used to make. These finds of Mom’s are the only way that he is going to get clothes now!

Mom says that it is time to go to bed. Since she won’t let me play with the computer when she isn’t around, I have to end my entry here! I hope you all are having a great day!

February 22nd, 2010

Much like my friends Tat and George the Duck, I received a medal for my efforts in the Teddy Olympics! I won in the hugging event! This makes me a very happy bear! I was worried that I would not place! Mom said that it is supposed to be the spirit of participating in such a grand event, but I can tell that she is glad that I won something too! There were so many great photos—and one of the events I entered really didn’t have a category! Mom says that we practice more next time—perhaps we will take more photos all year long! I can enter more events that way. I thought about entering the bed jumping event, but Mom said that I ought not to jump on the bed. There was an unmaking the bed event though! I probably could have only done that once before Mom would have been kind of peeved!

Mom discovered a few days ago that Naples, one of our new friends, had two owies! He had a owie on his leg and another on his cheek! Mom worked up her courage and started to sew him up! He was under teddy anesthetics the entire time, so it didn’t hurt him at all. 

That is the little hole that was in his leg. He said that he really didn’t notice it much, but still appreciated Mom patching him up. It only took Mom a few minutes to patch his leg up, but it took a while longer for her to do his cheek. She didn’t want to make any mistakes. After she was finished, I gave him a big hug! He said that it was kind of scary! But he is all better now! Mom has had to do surgery of this kind on Opal as well—one of the webbings of her feet had come loose! I have been lucky thus far, but I am waiting for the surgery on my paws!

I have been having fun lately chatting on the Bear Place. If I go after Mom gets out of work sometimes around 3 my time, it is the right time in the UK. We have a lot of fun talking about bear things and sometimes human things. We talked about Twitter and hash-tags and the like today. We also talked about something called wine gums—which is apparently some kind of candy! I like talking to plushies from different countries. It makes me feel like a very multi-cultural bear, I guess!

Mom uploaded some new photos to my Picasa folder. We went through the Photobucket album that Mom has had since the beginning of her digital picture taking career and found some of my friends and I. The first camera that Mom had took pretty crummy photos inside, so some of them aren’t the greatest. But Mom says that they’re a part of my history, so we posted them. We’re not sure if you can see the photos by that link. I know you have to have a Google account, but that is as far as we understand!

February 19th, 2010

My mom found this book at Goodwill last week. Through my mom’s limited language skills (mostly Google), she thinks this is a copy of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak in Dutch! Mom has read this book—in English—a long time ago. I think it is strange for a book in Dutch to be found at Goodwill by a person such as my mom who reads blog entries by people who live in the Netherlands!

Mom has found several new friends at Goodwill lately. She thinks that someone must’ve gotten rid of their entire Build-a-Bear collection. Mom found the following new friends:

• Larkspur- a bear with a Build-a-Bear patch on her foot; still unsure of what kind she is.
• Miles- a shaggy dog
• Morton- a Baby’s First Bear Blue; he comes from sometime between 1997 and 1998!
• Naples- a velvet teddy
• Sheridan- last year’s St. Patrick’s Day teddy

She also found some new clothes for us. A lot of the clothes she buys for us come in grab bags of various different sizes and origins. The person who gets the most out of the entire thing is usually Tilia, because she is Barbie sized!

Mom says that I should admit that we have plenty to do online. With Twitter, BearPlace, and the like, we spend a good half hour each day checking my various online profiles. She says that along with her various online profiles, we probably spend too much time online. I don’t think it’s much of a problem! All my friends are online!

February 16th, 2010

Mom was really impressed when we found the Bear Club. When we found the Bear Place, we were even more impressed. In the past couple of days, we’ve found several other teddy social networking websites! Now we’re impressed with the availability of such places for plushies to meet other plushies! We did sign up for an account on Fofurree. Our friend, Tat, is on there. We also found a place called Soft Toys and TeddyandCo! Who would have thought that there were five places on the internet for bears to hang out. We didn’t make an account for the other two. Mom says that along with Twitter, I have enough things to do. (We found these other places by clicking links and googling things that we found via Twitter! )

There seemed to be plenty of entries on Twitter for the Teddy Olympics! I wish I would have entered the napping event! Some of the other entrants looked like they were having very nice naps! And the eating events—the food that some of those plushies were eating looked very good! We will have to plan better for next year! I can practice all year long! We can also take the photos all year long too so we can chose the best ones for the event itself!

Princess, our old English bulldog, allowed me to sit near her and pet her a few days ago. She is a good dog most of the time but sometimes awfully cranky! She’s never hurt me, but she’s pushed me off the couch a few times! On my Picasa folder, there are a few pictures of her letting me get closer to her. She sniffed my hand and let me sit next to her for a while before she grew bored and left!