Monday, December 7

She's here! Eliana Joy arrived at 12:46 p.m. on Wednesday, November 11. The labor was long, but we did it. Praise the L-rd! Eric was an amazing coach, helping me through each contraction and encouraging me that we could do it. We also had great support from Cami, our doula, a fantastic nurse named Lisanne, and both grandmas. It was truly a group effort, and I couldn't have done it without them.


Here's a good Simon family photo, especially since we hadn't slept all night.




And this is our favorite picture so far of Eliana. Isn't she adorable?



We seem to be adjusting to life pretty well, especially considering these last few weeks have included Eric completely changing roles at work and packing for our move to my parents'. Never a dull moment.

I think my favorite part of adding Eliana to our family has been watching how much Eric loves her. It makes me love him even more. He's the greatest papa (accent on the second syllable) ever.
Posted by Picasa

Wednesday, October 28

More Belly Photos


As one of the many gifts that my sisters-in-law keep giving me, we received a maternity photo shoot from Lauren. She did a great job, in our humble opinion, and you can see the whole collection here.
Posted by Picasa

Tuesday, October 6

Intense Eric

Since there wasn't enough going on in our lives right now to keep him challenged, Eric has decided to get his master's degree from the American Institute of Holy Land Studies. He's actually in the middle of an intensive week of classes right now, covering 5 classes in 6 days. To enroll in the program, he had to submit a picture of himself. He selected a different photo to send the school, but this is my personal favorite. It's just called "Intense Eric" for now, although it seems deserving of something cooler, more along the lines of Blue Steel. Suggestions are welcome.

Tuesday, August 11

Well, we continued to have what was probably our best vacation yet. Some highlights:
  • An evening in Beaufort, a small town close to Callawassie that has a more beautiful boardwalk than Hilton Head, in our opinion. It's smaller and less crowded, which was nice. They also have porch swings set up all along the waterfront, so Eric and I watched the last of the sunset after eating dinner on the patio of a local restaurant.
  • A special Italian dinner at the Callwassie Club, complete with red-and-white checked tablecloths and a self-playing piano.
  • Having the 9-hole course outside our back door be closed for repairs, so we could walk on the golf course anytime we wanted.
  • Pulling pins, holding golf clubs, and driving the golf cart at full speed as Eric's caddy, while he played 9 holes in a lightning storm.

The Gallery on the 1st Hole



On Friday we said our final goodbyes to our lovely island and drove up to Portsmouth, Virginia to see Lee Schrock, affectionately known by some as Two Cat Lee. Lee's in the Navy, so we haven't seen him much these past few years. He came back for a visit this summer, reminding us of how much we missed him, so we couldn't pass up the opportunity to see him once we were already on the East Coast.


Other than eating great food, having great conversation, and playing record amounts of Settlers of Catan while we were with Lee, we also went to a naval museum, part of which included walking around the USS Wisconsin.








Overall a great trip, and the time with Lee was one of the biggest highlights. We love you, Lee!





Tuesday, August 4

Oh yeah, and last Tuesday Eric was very sneaky and took me over to Hilton Head Island to see fireworks. If you don't know, I love fireworks. They shot them off over the water, so we stood on the edge of the boardwalk area at Shelter Cove to watch. It was great. I love that guy.
We are officially on vacation, in case you've tried to get a hold of us and failed. Eric and I are being blessed by the incredible hospitality of his aunt and uncle, who have opened their home and their villa up to us.

We drove an incredibly quick and easy 20-some hours to South Carolina last Saturday. Then we spent Sunday through Thursday enjoying the incredible atmosphere of Callawassie Island. Here are some pictures of one of our neighbors.





And a short video of the street where we're staying:





On Friday we drove up to Charlotte to spend a relaxing weekend with Eric's incredibly hospitable aunt and uncle, Sandy and Tom. Eric had a chance to fit in some golf lessons with Tom, as well as soundly beat us all at Catan. We really enjoyed the chance to catch up with them on this trip, especially since they usually have to make the trip to Kansas City. It's always fun to enter someone else's world for a while.



On Sunday we also visited Morning Star, Rick Joyner's church. We both really enjoyed hearing Joyner share. We had a good connection with a young couple after the service and also had an opportunity to receive some ministry from Morning Star's prophetic teams.


This week we're back at Callawassie, enjoying our down time. Hopefully this weekend we'll drive up to Portsmouth, VA to see our friend Lee.

Blessing the Baby

On July 20, Eric and I invited our family to join us for a time of blessing Baby Simon. We wanted to set aside a time for focused, intentional spiritual blessing for our baby before he or she officially enters the world. Our hope is that every year, on July 20, we will stop and take spiritual inventory with our child, seeing all the wonderful things God has done and seeking His will for their spiritual growth in the coming year.

We were both so overwhelmed by the beautiful and powerful prayers and blessings that our families gave. It was great to have both sides come together and share. Here's a picture taken during Betty's blessing.

A huge thanks to our families for all of their love, support, and prayers for Baby Simon!

Thursday, May 21

In case you haven't heard the news . . .




Baby Simon will be joining the family around November 2.


The Value of Music

In my Goodreads comments, I recently remarked on the need for not only good literature but godly literature - and that I refuse to believe the two must be separate. My dualistic, (and ironically enough ) Greek-style education has told me they cannot co-exist.

The discussions I've had with several people about the topic also raise the macro issues of the importance of "art" in life at all. What I have posted for you here addresses that rather beautifully, regarding the specific art of music. And perhaps it also raises the question of what role our spirits play or how exactly our spirits interact with music.

This is a welcome address to entering freshmen at Boston Conservatory, given by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of the music division, forwarded to me by Eric, who received it from his mom.

Welcome Address, by Karl Paulnack
“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school—she said, “you’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without rec reation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we cannot with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heartwrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings—people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier—even in his 70’s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?”

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

Wednesday, January 7

I saw this on the For Zion's Sake blog, which is really worth reading if you don't already. Especially with the war in Gaza right now, it's priceless to have someone pulling actual news sources together, not the ridiculously and frustratingly inaccurate headlines and highlights carried by the major news sources.

Anyway, click here to Send a Soldier a Smile.

Christopher also included this paragraph, which I will pass on to you:

Of course, you may want to do more, and you might be willing to spend a few bucks to do so, in which case, you can send a Soldier Gift Package to the units on the fronts in Lebanon & Gaza. The cost is $18, and 18 is the number for life (חַי), which is what we wish all soldiers.