I've decided to blog a week in the life of Noelle. Starting today, my goal is to document the week's daily activities in words and pictures to have as a keepsake for us and to give our family and friends a glimpse into our everyday lives. One picture is posted here to the right, the others you can see on our Picasa Web Albums page here. I hope you enjoy it! Mondays are long because we have no planned activities, so sorry for the novel!

6:45 AM - Noelle starts calling for Daddy and won't stop saying his name until he opens her door. She helps Daddy let the dogs outside, they play a while and have breakfast, and Mommy gets to stay in bed until 7:15. I sit with Noelle until she finishes breakfast while Daddy gets ready for work. She can be a slow eater, because the girl talks.

7:40 AM - Daddy leaves for work, lots of "I love you, Daddy!" and "Have a good day, Daddy!" I turn on a show while I get breakfast, and another while I take a shower. This morning's choices were Dora the Explorer and Pinky Dinky Doo. She started watching a show in between that happened to be on TV called Lazy Town, but a few minutes in pronounced that the show was "too grouchy."

9:30 AM - I suggest that we go to the zoo, and she likes that idea so we gather up our things and head out. We went to the zoo's playground first, which is a rare treat because it tires me out to have her run around in there. It's a huge wooden castle style playground, lots of little passageways that are hard for a pregnant woman to get through!

12:15 PM - We left the zoo and I was feeling lazy, so we stopped for lunch at Burger King. She basically orders her own lunch, telling the man she wants milk and chicken nuggets.

1:30 PM - Home for a story and naptime. At 1:45 I hear her light switch on, I go in to put her back in bed. A minute later she keeps calling out "Mommy! Can you hear me?" I go in again, she says her baby doll would like to swing with her after nap. I say okay, she finally goes to sleep.

3:15 PM - I hear baby doll fall out of bed, which wakes up Noelle. Naptime was too short.

3:20 PM - Swinging on the front porch. Sans baby - I guess she changed her mind.

3:30 PM - I decide to try watercolor painting on her little table outside. She's slow to warm up to the idea, but eventually gets very into it, so I decide to strip her down so she can paint her arms, legs, and tummy. This was followed by bathtime, as you might have guessed! I added some bubble bath to help get all the paint off faster. Then another episode of Dora while I clean up from the painting project.

5:20 PM - Daddy gets home, playtime until dinner is ready. I leave at 5:40 for a meeting, so thanks to Daddy for logging the rest of the evening!

5:50 PM - Dinnertime. Noelle gets a time out at the end for playing with her "big girl cup" of milk which led to spilling it. During the time out, Andy hears crying alternating with "Daddy?" from Noelle's room. He goes in to find her arm stuck in her changing table cabinet at the elbow. He semi-sternly scolds her about putting her arm in the cabinet, but when he extracts her arm he hears "thank you daddy". "Thank you." "Daddy, thank you." and can't help but laugh and hug her.

6:15 pm - Noelle finds an invisible bug friend she names "Corty" whom she keeps with her the rest of the night, even taking him to bed with her.

6:45 pm - Andy reads Noelle and Corty a story, then puts her (them?) to bed.

10:00 PM - Crying, but we don't have to go in there!

10:18 PM - Crying again, we do have to go in there. I hope she sleeps the rest of the night!

I have to admit that I get really tired of my child's imagination sometimes. The amount of time I spend speeding up the car because a dragon is behind us, rolling down the window at a stop sign so she can pet a hippo, making up activities me and the monster I'm leading out of her room at naptime are going to do, eating invisible food, and especially being told I'm doing it *the wrong way* is more than I ever thought possible. It is all so real to her, though. This morning she went to get her baby doll a snack in the living room, and when she got out there a song was on tv. She ran back to me in the bedroom and held out her empty hand, saying, "Can you take this for baby? I'm going to go to the living room to dance." I couldn't believe that her imaginary snack had so much importance to her that she had to deliver it before stopping to dance.

Don't get me wrong, I love that she is creative. I guess the imagination itself is not what sometimes wears me thin, it's more that I have to have a role in it. I would love for her to imagine all day long if I didn't have to do it, too. It's just been so long since I imagined. A friend of mine suggested that I use a technique from improv comedy to handle imagination, which is to "accept and further." Accept that what Noelle is saying is true, and take it up one more step to add to the story. That really does work for the most part, if I'm doing it purely for fun and not with an agenda. I guess that most of us just lose that ability to look beyond what is really there and imagine what could be.

I'm in a Bible study going through the book "Strong Women, Soft Hearts" and the chapters we've read so far talk about how we lose our passion and our hearts because of pain and other life experiences. I tend to not try things or put myself out there often because I fear failure or rejection, among other things. Pain is a part of all of our lives, and it is only when we begin to accept it as our companion that we can have true joy and peace. Today in my group we talked about how God pursues our hearts, and how it makes us feel that he cares for us in that way. I shared that I so often try to protect my heart by not letting it carry me away, but although that might help me hold onto every piece of my heart, it's a dead heart that I'm holding. Whether we choose to give our heart away to follow a dream, and risk failure, or we choose to "protect" it by keeping it locked up, we are going to lose heart either way. God desires for us to give Him our heart, and promises that we will be even more wholly ourselves if we do so. He wants us to be fully ourselves and fully alive, the way he created us to be. Only through pouring our heart out to Him can we be our true selves, and do and be what He planned for us.

The author writes that if you follow your tears, what causes you pain or stirs passion inside of you, you will find what is dear to God and how you should live your life. When you are raising children, it can be easy to just put off your dreams until "later." When they go to school, maybe I'll do something for myself. God wants me to realize, though, that my life is now, and he desires for me to live it. Being a stay at home mom is not just a thing to get through. God never gets tired of my imagination, in fact He has dreams that are so much bigger than mine I can't comprehend them. His call for us to be childlike in our faith is something I hope to understand more every day that I spend with Noelle. I hope she never stops imagining.

So I'm up at 3 AM. I'm hoping this is a fluke and not the beginning of pregnancy insomnia already, something I *so enjoyed* with Noelle in the third trimester. I did get a lot of e-mailing and work done in those early morning hours, but really, I would rather sleep! People try to tell you that this is your body's way of preparing you for taking care of a new baby. I say that's C-R-A-P. If my body really wanted to help me out, it would let me sleep as much as possible up to delivery day. You don't ever get used to sleep deprivation. Believe me, having a child who didn't sleep through the night for 13 months, I know.

It doesn't help that I'm feeling tired anyway, even though I had a nice relaxing weekend in Tulsa with Beth and Mike Arroyo. I got to sleep in, didn't have a toddler to take care of, went out to eat, and spent some great time with wonderful people. It was an excellent getaway, that just happened to be capped off by a terrible evening at a really awful airport. As it was, I left Tulsa at 5:30 PM then had a scheduled 3 hour layover in Kansas City. I wasn't going to get home until 11:10, which is already a good hour or so past my usual bedtime. When I got to KC, I looked on the screen for my gate number and saw that instead of "on time", it said "11:30" next to my flight. WHA? Apparently some weather on the east coast caused basically every flight in the airport to be about 2 hours delayed. And that airport is so weirdly layed out, and so lacking in the food department, it was not a great place to be for 5 hours. Most of it was closed anyway, I guess because it was Sunday night and they hate me. My back hurt terribly, my legs started to hurt as they do when I'm tired, and by the time I finally landed in Nashville at 1 AM, I was sobbing. Andy had to bring Noelle with him to get me, luckily she could care less about sleep and loved to be up in the middle of the night.

This mom gig (pre and post birth) has definitely put a large cramp in my sleeping style. I will definitely say, though, that even on the days that I don't know how I'm going to make it through, it's totally worth it. Noelle is an amazing child, so funny, smart, polite, and creative. I'd rather be losing sleep because I'm taking care of her than for any other reason. And I'm sure I'll lose sleep when she's older for much different reasons! So for now, I will just grin and bear it, and relish hearing her say "I love you, too."

So Father's Day was this past weekend and I had a great time. This is only my third one (as a Dad myself) but this was the best one. We had lots of good food, I got to spend lots of time with Noelle and Jaime (and the coming baby), and I even got lots of time to myself. All in all it was a great weekend in general, but even better as Father's Day.

Saturdays are Jaime's day to sleep in, so when Noelle woke up at 6:45 I jumped out of bed and went to get her. She was in a great mood so we talked while I got her dressed. You might recall that the Matthews' have joined a CSA program (think farmer's co-op), which we share with Brad and Heather Daugherty. Sat is the day that Eric and Cher (from Bugtussle farms) are in Nashville, and it was the Matthews' turn to go pick it up.

Noelle and I headed over to pick up the produce, singing and laughing and talking the whole way. When we got there she helped me collect our goods, and even helped me weigh the peas. After we got back in the car, I decided that Jaime hadn't had enough chance to rest, so Noelle and I sacrificed our time and went to eat at Fido's.

All in all, my weekend with Noelle was great. We had so much fun playing and talking and laughing. It's a special blessing to have a child who's so good-natured, and bright, and clever. I'll leave you with this little story about Noelle to tie it all back together. We planned on calling both my dad, and Jaime's on Sunday and so we trained Noelle to yell "Happy Father's Day" on cue. "Okay Noelle, when they pick up the phone what do you say?" "Happy Father's Day!". "That's right Noelle...good job." Right before we called Jaime's dad, Noelle let's out a huge toot. Jaime looks over at her and says "Noelle...what do you say?" to which Noelle responds loudly "Happy Father's Day!!!"

I hope everyone had as good a Father's Day Weekend as I did.

Noelle loves bugs, she has no fear of them and will stop everything to just watch one walk by. If she has one on her body and it flies away or falls off, she continually asks what happened to it and looks around for it. One day recently she found a ladybug, and the only way I could convince her to put it down and move on was to let her find it a "home." She's definitely not a girly girl when it comes to bugs.

Just now we were out in the pool and a moth fell in and of course was dead. She picked it up, asked all kinds of questions about it, then asked if she could touch the wings. I said sure, and she sweetly said, "Aww, it's gonna be okay buggy" as she pet the wing. Then she said, "Can I rip his arms off?"