Tomorrow we’ll take a bus back to the capitol Chisinau and take the night train back to Bucharest, arriving there early on Saturday morning. We’ll have a day and a night in Bucharest, again with our host Tony. Then on Sunday, we’ll fly to Italy and have a week there with our friends. In Bucharest or Italy, we’ll try to take some time and write down some thoughts and stories as well as post some pictures and videos from our time here in Moldova.

Thanks for sharing this experience with us and praying for us and Felicia.

Lots of love,
Jessica and Adam

Tomorrow, Tony will show us some of the sights, and in the evening, he’ll put us on the overnight train into Moldova (his home country). We’ll arrive in Chisinau, the capitol of Moldova on Saturday morning, and we will meet our hosts from CERI, Sweet Sleep‘s parent organization. Then, on Sunday, we’ll ride a van up to Balti where we’ll get to spend a week with dear Felicia and her friends. We’re excited!

-Jessica

p.s. While we were in the air, I missed posting another nice write-up we had for our lullaby CD, this time from Peekaboo Picks. Thanks to them for such a nice mention on their product blog. You can read the blog here.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to read our interview with Amy on Lullaby Link.

Thanks, Amy! It’s been a pleasure working with you.

-Jessica

Moldova has an ungodly number of orphans due to the poverty of the people. Our friends at Sweet Sleep went there a few years ago and saw that the kids in the orphanages were sleeping 2-3 per bed on filthy, soiled, lumpy mattresses that were over 50 years old. Sweet Sleep began building beds for all of the kids in several orphanages.

Stemming from the poverty and social situation in Moldova, orphans have little choice than to enter organized crime or the sex trade when they “graduate” from the orphanage boarding school at age 16. Thus, Sweet Sleep initiated child sponsorships through their parent organization CERI. This is how we met Felicia.

For four years, we have exchanged emails, sent gifts, contributed toward her schooling and added to a savings for Felicia’s future.

Tomorrow, we’ll be on our way to meet her for the first time.

We’re flying through England for a day and then landing in Romania where we’ll catch a train to Chisinau, the capitol of Moldova. From Chisinau, we’ll ride a van up to the village of Falesti where we’ll meet Felicia, her little sister Eugenia, her good friends Marina and Doina, and the other kids at the orphanage as well as help out in any way we can for a few days.

We are so excited to finally meet Felicia in person, but we’re also a little nervous about meeting her after so long. Adam and I would be so grateful if you would please remember us in your thoughts and prayers over the next couple of weeks.

If you are interested in building a bed for a child who needs a safe haven in their unsure life, you can click here to learn more about Sweet Sleep and support them. We are also donating 10% of all proceeds from sales of our Laughing Tree Lullabies to Sweet Sleep. Visit CERI’s site for more information on child sponsorships.

Thank you for your love and support. We’ll let you know how our trip goes!

-Jessica (and Adam)

First, the name Laughing Tree comes from Adam’s and my surname Lofbomm. Lofbomm is an originally German name that has been changed several times over the generations so much so that the original spelling and meaning are lost to us, but our best guess (and the meaning that we like the best) is that lof=laugh and bomm=baum=tree.

It’s a good name for us and what we’re trying to create, for several reasons. Laughter is a pretty obvious one: it suggests lightheartedness, joy, mirth, pleasure, openness and ease. A tree is something alive, organic, growing, reaching and beautiful with deep roots and many branches. A tree is home for many other living organisms. That’s what we want to be as Laughing Tree.

And what are we doing here with this site? Well, our big dream is community. Physical community, ongoing dialogue and collaboration with artists and creatives who appreciate and add to the beauty around us. This site is a first step, an online dialogue that we hope to bring into the physical realm as soon and often as possible.

We have a couple of products that we’ve created and want to get out to the world, namely our Laughing Tree Lullabies CD, fine art photographs (to be available online soon), as well as some ideas in the works like illustrated books, short films and more. But the products are just one branch of Laughing Tree.

We’re going to be using this blog more and more to initiate a dialogue about creativity, music, arts– beauty in general. We want to dialogue about what other creatives are doing, how to foster more creativity in our lives, how to raise children up in a creative environment, and what good we can do with our creative minds and projects. These are not things that we know a lot about yet, but they’re things we’re interested in, and we’ll want as much interaction from you as possible, so we can all learn and grow.

So, what do you think? Are you up for a dialogue?

Laughing Tree– art for your eyes and ears. What can we create together?

-Jessica

We’ll have the full set up on this site in a day or two. Happy Labor Day!

-Jessica

Yesterday, we met Lionel Richie at an antique market in Paris. He was lovely and gracious. We gave him a copy of our Laughing Tree Lullabies, Vol. 1 for his new grandson– his daughter Nicole Richie is due soon.

Do you have your own copy of Laughing Tree Lullabies yet?

-Jessica

Look! It’s online now! You can order CDs to be shipped anywhere in the world. You can also buy mp3s on CDBaby. We’ll be up on iTunes and such soon, but that takes a little longer to process. We’ll let you know when that’s live.

We’re so glad that the day has come to share our music with you! Enjoy!

Today we’re flying to Europe, by way of an overnight in Tokyo. New things are afoot. Catch you on the flip-side.

-Jessica

Laughing Tree, composed of the American couple Adam and Jessica Lofbomm, has created a truly eclectic and chill concept album—a collection of lullabies from around the world, blending various languages, musical styles and ambient sounds found in everyday life.

Seoul, South Korea,­ June 1, 2009 — Adam and Jessica Lofbomm are Americans that have lived in Seoul for the past three years. They love travel, good music, nightlife…and kids. They sought to integrate their diverse interests and global lifestyle with the music they loved. At the same time, they saw so many of their hipster friends reaching 30 and starting families, so this husband and wife duo decided to create something that would bring all of these pieces together. The result is “Laughing Tree Lullabies, Vol. 1”.

Nancy Kim, founder of the non-profit humanitarian organization, Educate a Child described the album as “mellow lullabies with an adult’s musical sensibilities.” Laughing Tree’s labor of love is at the same time enlightening and lulling for drowsing babies, while nostalgic and captivating for adults. It is a collection of songs from around the world, intended to lay down quality music for the adult listener, while fostering in young children an ease with different languages and musical styles. “Laughing Tree Lullabies, Vol. 1” is the first in a coming series.

Laughing Tree has also observed that many of their peers, the current generation of parents, do not know the standard lullaby repertoire. They have undertaken this series to revive the somewhat lost art of singing lullabies—making the archaic something relevant, fresh.

The long play Volume 1 is an almost continuous flow from the first to the final, twenty-first track. Ambient, repetitive, or otherwise hypnotic sounds from everyday life link one song to the next. Some of these field recordings include cricket songs, washing dishes, a murmuring crowd, writing with pencil, a drum circle, etc. Jessica sang each of the fourteen lullabies, and seven nursery rhymes are peppered throughout, narrated by Adam.

The diversity of the music can be understood when reading the list of instruments used to record “Laughing Tree Lullabies, Vol. 1”: layers and layers of vocals, guitar, piano, chimes, ukulele, accordion, kazoo, tea kettle, spoons, claps and African drum. Paired with the changing flow of the field recordings underneath, each song is a unique experience, yet the pieces make up a cohesive album that is best experienced from start to finish.

Track Listing

1. All the Pretty Little Horses (Traditional American)
2. Summertime (G. Gershwin, D. Heyward)
3. Bed in Summer (Robert Louis Stevenson)
4. Pio, Pio, Pio (Traditional Latin American)
5. Bow-Wow Says the Dog (Anonymous)
6. Somewhere Over the Rainbow (H. Arlen, E.Y. Harburg)
7. My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean (Traditional Scottish)
8. Oh Shenandoah (Traditional American)
9. Bee! I’m Expecting You! (Emily Dickinson)
10. Arirang (Traditional Korean)
11. I See the Moon (M. Wilson)
12. Hey! Diddle, Diddle (Anonymous)
13. Toora Loora Loo (Traditional Irish/J.R. Shannon)
14. My Bed is a Boat (Robert Louis Stevenson)
15. Wynken, Blynken and Nod (Dutch Lullaby/Eugene Field)
16. Schlafe, Mein Prinzchen (W.A. Mozart)
17. To Bed (Anonymous)
18. Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star (J. Taylor)
19. Morning Has Broken (Traditional Gaelic/E. Farjeon)
20. Laughing Song (William Blake)
21. Danny Boy (Traditional Irish/F. Weatherly)

Though Adam and Jessica Lofbomm comprise the core of Laughing Tree, it is best described as a collective. Adam and Jessica make a habit of bringing others into their creative projects, and the Lullaby series is no exception. First, international friends from such places as Korea, Peru, Colombia, Germany, Holland, the UK, and the USA shared well-loved lullabies from their homes, in their languages. Laughing Tree found invaluable musical partnership in fellow American in Seoul, Zach Bardon. Other contributors included Alex Sheykin, a Russian accordionist and James Jooyoung Jeong, a Korean singer. Jessica’s brother Jeff Rau helped stateside by recording a Kansas thunderstorm for “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, and Long Beach, California artist Dave Hill crafted the nostalgic cover design.

Partnership with Sweet Sleep

Laughing Tree is donating 10% of all profits from the “Laughing Tree Lullabies” series to support the work of Sweet Sleep, an organization that provides beds for some of the world’s poorest children.

According to the Sweet Sleep website, there are more than 210 million orphans worldwide, and each day, 5,760 more children become orphans. Sweet Sleep is a faith-based non-profit organization that exists “to share God’s love by providing beds to the world’s orphaned and abandoned children.”

Orphaned and abandoned children in Third World countries suffer from lack of sufficient or healthy places to sleep. These children often sleep on old, broken and soiled beds or have no beds at all— forcing them to sleep on paper-thin mats or cold, hard floors, making them susceptible to insects and disease. Sweet Sleep provides these children a solid new bed frame with a thick foam mattress, vinyl mattress and pillow covers, a fluffy new pillow, comfy new sheets, a cozy new comforter and a mosquito net when needed. For more information about Sweet Sleep, visit www.sweetsleep.org.

Since 2005, Adam and Jessica Lofbomm have sponsored Felicia Stavila, a 12-year-old girl at an orphanage in Falesti, Moldova through Sweet Sleep. They are glad to be able to support the ongoing good work of Sweet Sleep by giving back with Laughing Tree Lullabies. From June 4, for the remainder of 2009, Laughing Tree is touring Europe to promote their lullabies project, collect songs for “Laughing Tree Lullabies, Vol. 2”, and raise awareness and funds for Sweet Sleep. They will end up in Moldova to hand-deliver support for the orphanage there and meet Felicia in person for the first time.

Last night, on Sunday, May 31, Laughing Tree released their “Laughing Tree Lullabies, Vol. 1” to an international crowd at Club Oi in Seoul. This Tuesday, June 2, it will become available online through their website, LaughingTree.org by digital download or by CD to be shipped anywhere in the world.

About Laughing Tree

Laughing Tree is a creative arts collective founded in 2008 by Adam and Jessica Lofbomm that incorporates recorded and live music, photography and fine art, as well as on-screen and voice acting. Adam and Jessica are an American couple who married in Nashville, Tennessee in 2004, moved to Seoul, South Korea in 2006 and are now touring Europe for the remainder of 2009. In their work, they continually seek to highlight the beauty in the most mundane of things.

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Monday early morning, we departed from my aunt and uncle’s house in Annapolis, Maryland with my parents. They brought us to the Baltimore airport, and we said our good byes. It was really nice, and it wasn’t the emotional departure I thought it might be. We had such a good week together, it just felt like everything was right. We also had the sober focus on my Grandma still in the hospital, and our leaving just wasn’t as high on the scale of importance. I think this will be a good and challenging year for my family as well as us.

We had an easy and uneventful flight to Chicago, had a brief layover, then boarded our 12 hour flight to Tokyo. The flight to Tokyo was also surprisingly easy. We slept for most of the flight, read a little, and watched the in-flight “V for Vendetta”. We did get to fly over Alaska. That was cool. What rugged and beautiful land. We landed in Tokyo and had just enough time to deplane, wind our way up and through security again, freshen up and brush our teeth in the restroom and then board the same plane again for Seoul. We were in Seoul in no time, landing at 8:10 p.m. local time on Tuesday.

We got quickly through customs, all of our luggage came around the carousel in tact, we walked out to the arrivals area, and there was a Korean guy with our names on a sign, he helped Adam exchange some cash into Korean Won. The guy guided us to an airport van that drove us about 40 minutes to the English Village. There was a Korean girl named Monica waiting for us in the square, and she took us to our apartment which was twice the size we expected it to be.

Adam said that it was unfair that my first experience of Asia be so easy and smoothe when his first experience when he went to India was almost hellish. Anyway, I’ll leave you here because I need to get to work, but I will continue the recap soon. Have a great weekend. We miss and love you, our family anbd friends in the States.

-Jessica