Piano prodigy?

Over the holiday Will was opened to many new experiences, including - as we see here - playing the piano with Grandma Dekker. Enjoy our budding prodigy's composition. It's a modern piece.

And Happy New Year, everyone!

Dear God,

Thank you for protecting my brother Vitaly and my sister Marina in their terrible car wreck yesterday.

Love, Beth

Marina lost control of her car after a icy curve (Dec. 23), veered across the road, into a tree (the large one in the picture below) and flipped at least one time.

They got out of their seatbelts, put down the back passenger's side window (the only one that worked) and crawled out of the window (you can sorta see it in the very top picture).

A woman who lived nearby came in her SUV and had the kids sit in her car to get warm (it was about 12 degrees outside) while Dad, Nick and I came to get them. We didn't know it was as bad as it was.

The wreck happened in an very rural Amish community, so we had many people stop by to help and almost everyone that drove by stopped to see if they could do anything. I LOVE small towns for this very reason.

The state police (the road is under state jurisdiction, so the local police won't cover the area) took an hour to get there, which I was less than thrilled about, but he was very nice. They brought a flat bed tow truck and took the car away. It was, of course, totaled.

Both Marina and Vitaly were very shook up, but only had minor bruises. Thank God.

It's been such a rough day...

Whenever we feed Will from his bottle, he does something really funny with his hands. His normally flailing arms are calm and slow. He slowly rubs his face and his head, passing them gently over his eyes. Often it seems like he's rubbing his eyes, as if to say, "It's been such a hard, long day..."

Christmastime is here...

That's the thing about Christmas, isn't it? It always sneaks up on you.


But you're always happy when it's finally here.

This one goes out to Mike Dekker....

Wee fish ewe a mare egrets moose
Wee fish ewe a mare egrets moose
Wee fish ewe a mare egrets moose ...
Panda hippo gnu deer!

(Followers of this blog may remember that this is a repost of a previous post. And, just to let you know, the last line must be sung in a mock-operatic voice at the top of your lungs. If you want to do it right, that is.)

Merry Christmas!

Come, Thou Fount

I love Christmas carols. Sure, there are some that are cheesy and overplayed, and some of them have very strange lyrics (one of my favorites is from Here Comes Santa Claus, in which the singer sings "Let's gives thanks to the Lord above, 'cause Santa Claus comes tonight"). But some of my favorites, I've found, are the good old classic hymns, ones I sang in church growing up.

So I find myself fascinated when different musicians record updated versions of these hymns. One of my favorite hymns is Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing, which isn't necessarily a Christmas song, but I've come to associate it with the yuletide all the same. I've always been particularly struck by the lyrics, and its focus on our daily need for God's mercy and grace and our grateful response to it. And Christmas seems as good a time as any to celebrate that.

So when my favorite musician Sufjan Stevens released a version of Come Thou Fount on one of his Christmas albums, I was awestruck again by its beauty. Here are some of the lyrics:

Come, thou Fount of every blessing,
tune my heart to sing thy grace;
streams of mercy, never ceasing,
call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I'm fixed upon it,
mount of thy redeeming love.

Here I raise mine Ebenezer;
hither by thy help I'm come;
and I hope, by thy good pleasure,
safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
wandering from the fold of God;
he, to rescue me from danger,
interposed his precious blood.

O to grace how great a debtor
daily I'm constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here's my heart, O take and seal it,
seal it for thy courts above.

I've always been interested by the first line of the second verse: "Here I raise my Ebenezer." Until now, I assumed it meant like Ebenezer Scrooge from Dicken's A Christmas Carol, as if the lyrics are saying, "I'm giving up my inner Scrooge." But today my friend Amanda e-mailed me this link, which explains that Ebenezer is actually a Biblical reference to 1 Samuel, in which Samuel raises a monument to commemorate God's help to Israel. Samuel called the stone Ebenezer, which means "stone of help." So the Methodist pastor Robert Robinson, who penned the hymn in 1757, wrote of erecting his own monument to God's help.

I'll always think of this song as a Christmas song, I think because the birth of Christ instigates the hope that this song expresses.

A letter from Will to someone special...

Dear Maddie,

Thank you for the Adidas outfit. I look forward to the day when we can wear matching outfits... as we walk down the aisle together.

Sincerely,
Will

Thanksgiving and Will's First Bite

We headed to Greenville, PA for Thanksgiving this year. We decided that it would be fitting that Will's first solid food meal would be at dinner on Thanksgiving, and of course it was well-documented!

Here he is with his favorite Aunt Marcia!

You can see the excitement in his eyes!

There goes the first bite of rice cereal!

Ah, as independent as his mother...he had to try and feed himself...

So he grabbed the cup (which was my little engraved cup from when I was a baby...we had to be sentimental!)

And tried to take a "sip!"

Not much of it got into his mouth, but he seemed to enjoy the experience.

The whole Meyer family! From left to right: Nick, Will, my Dad, me, my Mom, Katie, Grandma Meyer, Marcia, Chip, Vitaly, Irina, James (Marina's fiance), Marina, and Abbey!

First bite of Punkin Roll!

I'm not sure what it is about Grandmas and their desire to feed babies bites of solid food, but even before we could try some rice cereal (more on that later), Will has had his first taste of punkin roll, a Meyer family favorite at Thanksgiving. I think he likes it! We'll never get him to eat rice cereal now, not that I blame him! Enjoy!