Rosie O'Donnell's 2½-year-old daughter, I Chelsea, didn't understand. Here it was, Christmas Day, and her baby brother—who had taken up residence in her family's Miami vacation home just days earlier—already had packages with his name on them under the tree. "She was like, 'How can he have presents? He doesn't even talk' " O'Donnell says, laughing. "She was very upset that there was stuff for him."

Better get used to it, Chelsea: Your mom loves kids ("She's a natural," says her pal Sylvia Drescher, mother of Fran). And Blake Christopher has come to stay. Born Dec. 5, the brown-haired bundle whom O'Donnell, 37, described in a statement as "half Italian, half hodgepodge" joins Chelsea and brother Parker, 4½—all of whom are adopted. "He eats, he sleeps, he's a good pooper," reports the talk show host, who enjoyed three weeks off with Blake and now brings him to the nursery at her New York City studio each day. "People say, 'My God, three,' but it's not such a big whoop. It's wonderful."

The never-married O'Donnell has a nanny plus siblings and close friends who sometimes look after the children. And her kids help each other. Parker "tells Blake stuff like, 'This is how you play baseball'—important things to a baby," O'Donnell says. Meanwhile, Chelsea, now past her initial shock, "always wants to hold him."

Why the urge to enlarge her brood? O'Donnell's brother Daniel says that because their own mother died when Rosie was 10, "she derives great joy from providing a stable home life for these children." Indeed, "my kids are the best things that ever happened to me," O'Donnell insists. "I hope to have five." That's a lot of Christmas presents.

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