Soul Mate Live

Soul Mate Live is an event put on by Bellevue Baptist for young married couples.  Its byline is “a date night with a purpose.”  Laura and I first started going to Bellevue about 6 months ago after attending a Soul Mate event.  Its somewhat of a spin off of Saturday Night Live.  There’s a skit portion, a band and a speaker that speaks on a topic that faces married couples.  Bellevue puts on the event about every 3 months.

Friday night they had another Soul Mate event.  This time I got to be a part of it.  The theme was “team spirit” and I played a sports announcer, Bobby Buttersworth.  I had a blast.  There is definitely nothing that is second rate about the event.  We had plenty of rehearsals, but in the end it was all worth it.  There was a shade over 800 people at the event and a great time was had by everyone.

I did a little bit of acting in high school and really enjoyed it.  I’d forgotten how much fun it is.  The comraderie with the other actors is awesome and you really lose yourself in the part.  I’m considering trying out for the Passion Play in the next week or two.  Check out the gallery for more pictures from the event.

Cold, Cold, Cold

Man, it is FREEZING here in Memphis.  Actually, I guess it is below freezing.  It doesn’t feel “too” cold walking from house to car and car to work and work to car and car to house.  But, if I’m outside any longer than that, I realize how fortunate we are to have houses and heat.  Man, it is cold.

All has been well around the Simons household.  I’ve been working on memorizing lines for a skit I’m going to be in a couple of weeks from now.  It is for Soul Mate Live at church.  I’m going to be a sports announcer.  It is amazing how you can remember some things after hearing them once and something like lines….you have to practice over and over and over and over and over.

Wanted to leave you with a headshot of Laura.  We were setting up lights the other night for a “headshot” that I’m going to be doing later on and I used Laura as my test subject.  She looks great, doesn’t she?

Painting and a Party

This past weekend we had a couple of people over from our cove to have a little get together.  We realized as we were heading out of town on New Year’s Eve that we never see our neighbors when it is cold.  We’re all outside every night when it is warm.  But, when cold weather comes, we stay indoors.  It’s much warmer, but we’re not near as social.  We decided to put an end to that.

I also wanted to throw in a quick picture of our little helper.  Haley is getting to be SO much fun.  She loves ‘upstairs’ and tries to go up quite often.

Big Girl Bed

Still working on getting Haley in her big girl bed.  Getting close!

Happy New Year!

Another year has come and gone.  Time seems to be going faster and faster.  Christmas was a blast.  Haley’s really getting into it.  Santa brought her a play kitchen and she’s having a ball.  He brought her a camera too.  We’ll see how she does.  Maybe she’s a budding photographer!

New Year’s Eve was a lot of fun.  We went to Darren and Teja’s for the night.  We’re definitely getting older.  We were asleep by 12:30 and were back up at 7:30 the next morning to paint.  We had a little help painting as you can see in the video below.  We managed to paint the three upstairs rooms.  Most importantly, we got Haley’s new room painted.  She seems to like it a lot.  She wanted to sleep there and threw a fit when we started to bring her down.  So I took her back up.  She climbed in bed and pulled up the covers.  We said prayers and I told her “night-night”.  She said “night-night”.  Then, as I left the room, she screamed and cried.   She wanted downstairs.  So I picked her up and got almost to the stairs again when she started crying “big girl bed”.  She ended up in the crib that night, but I think she’s warming up to sleeping upstairs.

Every year, we like to look back on the past year and reflect on the significant things that happened in our lives.  Here’s a taste of 2008:

Haley turned 1
I turned 30
Laura turned 29
We sold our house
We bought a house
Haley’s walking
We’re pregnant with number 2
We switched churches
I did another triathlon
I did another half marathon
We made some new friends
We lost some friends
We’re 1 bathroom shy of painting every room in our house
We went to San Francisco
The Bulldogs stunk it up AGAIN in football
Laura’s started managing a couple of beach condos in Florida
We had our 4th wedding anniversary
I went to Costa Rica on my first foreign mission trip

Those are the major things.  Of course, there are loads of things that seem insignificant right now, but have changed our lives.  Some of those moments were great.  Some of those moments were tough.  We’re just happy to be able to have “moments” and to get to share them with each other.