This week I've got a pretty funny experience to share with you. The past couple of weeks of blogs have been REALLY intense for me. From some of the AMAZINGLY AWESOME responses you all have written, I'm excited they meant something to you, too! If you haven't read the cool responses to the past 3 or 4 blogs, you should go back and have a look! Anyway - on to the fun!

Last night my wife was looking through her hope chest for something and ran across my monkey. Ok, some of you are chuckling already... so STOP! I'm talking about the stuffed animal that I had as a baby, all the way through my childhood. I was a VERY creative child, so I named my monkey, "Monkey".

ANYWAY, I was pretty excited to see Monkey, and was REALLY excited that Trey took a liking to him. Any monkeys, gorillas, etc. he calls, "Oo oo ah ah!" He LOVES monkeys, so of course he LOVES Monkey! I thought it was the coolest thing that the stuffed animal I grew up with, my son might enjoy growing up with, too!

He carried it around with him everywhere he went, and often carried him by his tail, just like I did when I was a kid! When it came time to go to bed, he wanted to sleep with "oo oo ah ah" (apparently his new name), which is exactly what I did when I was a kid. We told him "nigh nigh", he said, "nigh nigh", and he rolled over with "oo oo ah ah" to go to sleep.

We closed his door and headed to bed, like usual. But within a few minutes, we heard him screaming, "MAMA! DADA!" He came running in crying, "Oo oo ah ah no nigh nigh!" We have NO idea for SURE what he meant, but he said it over and over. We finally got him to sleep, and he did it again! We thought maybe the monkey was making it hard for him to sleep, so we tried taking it from him, but then he SCREAMED for his oo oo ah ah! Then he'd cry and say, "oo oo ah ah no nigh nigh" and throw the monkey.

It was like this for an hour. I finally took the monkey away and let him scream for a while, then told him he could have the monkey back if he rolled over and went to sleep. He finally calmed down, got the monkey, and went to sleep. The trouble was, he still woke up 3 times throughout the night, each time crying a little, but carrying oo oo ah ah into our bedroom.

I'm not SURE what was going on in his little 22 month old brain, but I THINK he was upset that "oo oo ah ah" was not going to sleep ("no nigh nigh"). I know it's silly, but it got me thinking about my relationship with God (that happens a lot with me and weird things that happen to me, if you didn't notice). I wonder how often God gives me something that He's REALLY excited about me getting, and in the beginning, I'm super excited, too. Then something changes, things aren't as great as I thought they would be when I first got this new exciting thing, and I'm not sure it's doing what it's supposed to do, and I get upset about the very thing God and I were SO excited about when it first happened!

In Trey's case, I don't know if "oo oo ah ah" will work out for him to sleep with at night, and I'm not sure it's going to work out to be the cool present I hoped it would be. But I KNOW God only gives me cool presents, so I need to trust that fact, no matter WHAT it feels like at the time.