Josh Renaud

Adam's picture

Jadzia loves to be outside. It makes no difference if it's hot; or if she has eaten; or if she's wearing pajamas; or whether it's raining. Under almost any conditions, Jadzia would rather be outside.

Of the many things we do outside, one of her favorites is to walk up to "the school." This refers to Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, which is just down the street from us.

(BTS was created from a merger of six parishes, including Saints John and James. The "new" parish uses the old Good Shepherd for its church building, and the old John and James buildings to house the school. My dad attended John and James elementary school when his family lived in Ferguson long ago.)

The school has some decent playground facilities which Jadzia could spend hours playing on. She isn't especially physically active on them. Instead, the structures become her "kitchen" or her "store" or whatever. She is also prone to carry a baby doll with her to the school, or to push her play stroller.

When we were going to the school yesterday, she told me "We're going to see Adam."

I thought she was pretending about someone from the Bible, which she often does. (The list of characters she pretends about has expanded to include Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, Elizabeth, and Jacob)

"Yeah, we're going to see the tree," she continued.

Wait a minute. I realized she was talking about somebody else entirely. It was a boy. I had forgotten his name, but not Jadzia. She remembered.

At the corner of the soccer/baseball field nearest the school buildings is a tree.

Months ago, Jadzia noticed under the tree a stone marker with a boy's image etched into it.

Jadzia asked who the boy was. I read the words carved in the stone and told her that this was a memorial to a boy named Adam who had died in 1998. He had been a student at John and James.

Death is not a totally foreign concept for Jadzia. Every time she gets into her car seat, she points out the assorted dead "bees" right underneath the rear window. I've shown her dead earthworms on hot sidewalks. Occasionally when looking at photos of relatives who have passed, I might mention the fact to her.

I explained to her that I didn't know what happened to Adam, but that he had died and now he was in heaven with Father God. All of us are going to die someday, and we never know when God might want to bring us home, whether we'll be young like Adam or very old.

She seemed to listen intently, and wanted to look at the marker. I have no idea how the information was processed, because she was quickly onto something else and moving on.

But she never forgets that marker.

Keaton birthday Wii-kend

On Monday and Tuesday, we spent a 1.125-day vacation in St. James, Mo. where we visited my brother Justin and his family. His youngest son Keaton was celebrating birthday Numero Uno.

Of course everytime we get together now, it's a party, whether there's a birthday involved or not. After all, there's four adults and four little perpetual-motion machines … I mean kids.

As we drove down I-44 we passed through scattered rain showers. Eventually we came to a point where we were facing a distant line of very dark clouds. And from those clouds came constant lightning strikes. It was really something to see. Eventually the rain began to pour, which is my least favorite condition in which to drive. But we made it through with no problems.

We arrived around lunchtime so that Yoli could decorate a cake for Keaton. She had come with the pieces of the cake already baked ahead of time. She had prepared a flat chocolate cake and a round carrot cake, which she was going to fashion into a baseball.

The kids had their fun, and Justin and I had ours. He now has a Nintendo Wii. This was my third chance to play with one. The first time had been at my friend Matt's house two Christmases ago. The second time was with my cousin Alan when we went to San Antonio for Jonathan's wedding this spring.

I'm not half-bad at the bowling game, and I did fairly well with the baseball. The golf is just flat-out insane.

Yoli was really intrigued by the idea of making a "Mii," the little character that represents you as a player. Justin made one for me that was actually a decent resemblance. Before the trip was finished, we had also made Miis for Ludi and Yoli.

Yoli's cake turned out beautifully. And the party was pretty fun. They invited a ton of kids from their church small group, and Justin's house became a madhouse with all the little tykes running around. He busted out a ball pit, which is essentially an inflatable pool that you fill with plastic balls instead of water. The kids jumped in, including Keaton and Ludi, the one-year-olds. Jadzia got into the mix eventually, but it took her a few minutes before she was sure she could join the fray. Balls were being thrown everywhere fast and furious, and it didn't really stop, not even once all the guests and gone home.

We stayed overnight at Justin's house, and Yoli and I snuck in a little more Wii that night and the next morning. We ate at "Diana's Diner" for breakfast and before too long, it was time to return home. All in all, it was a good way to spend my "weekend" (I'm always off on Tuesdays and Wednesdays).

Softball season bites the dust

Today I finally got to play the elusive doubleheader that had been rained out twice before. It was a good day for me personally. I went 3-for-4 with 1 RBI in the two games. But my team, the Roid Ragers, still lost both games. We ended the season unvictorious.

Yoli and the girls came out for the first game. It seemed like they enjoyed it. Jadzia really got into the "picnic" aspect of it. We brought a little food she and Ludi to snack on and a blanket for the girls to sit on. It was nice to be able to come over and say hi to them between innings. Jadzia also got into the spirit of the game, yelling whenever she would hear the players yelling something. (Of course her father was probably one of the biggest yellers on the field)

But out in the field it was hot! The high temperature for the day was 99° according to the Post-Dispatch. Thankfully there were breezes much of the time, and a lot of shade behind the benches. But those same breezes kicked up a lot of dust. I was a muddy mess later in the evening when I hit the showers.

Between games I had to shuttle Yoli and the girls back home to take their naps. I had just enough time to eat a bit of peach pie before heading back to play in Game Two.

All in all I enjoyed the season. I wish it had rained less so that we wouldn't have had such an erratic schedule. I probably would have played better. But I feel like I made a lot of progress in the last few weeks: I ended the season on a 6-for-10 tear (if you count a practice game we played one of the Sundays we got rained out).

Most of all it was fun to hang out with friends, and, gasp, have some physical activity.

I can't believe I just wrote that last phrase.

Comments are working again (hopefully)

Lately I've been feeling bummed. I had been writing a lot more on the weblog the last few months ... but there were no comments.

So I posted the video of Jadzia. After a couple of days, still no comments.

I thought: "Sure, maybe people aren't interested in what I'm writing. But how could anyone not respond to this awesome video?" I was puzzled and began to investigate.

Turns out that the problem started when I upgraded my blog software a couple months ago.

And it turns out that you all HAVE been writing comments ... it's just that my weblog classified all your comments as spam!

Thankfully I have been able to salvage all the comments made in the last two months. Unfortunately any comments you all posted between mid-April and mid-May were deleted automatically by the system. (feel free to go back and post more comments though!)

Anyway, order has been restored and comments now should work normally, so please post away!

Video: "Mary" makes music

Hear Jadzia, the world's future music superstar. She belts out the classics, like "Twinkle, Twinkle," and mixes in some of her own new material, like "Mary had a Donkey Kong."

To watch this movie, you need Apple's QuickTime software installed on your computer.

My little hobbits

For Father's Day, my daughters got me "The History of the Hobbit," though neither of them probably knew that until after I opened the gift.

I had never read any Tolkien prior to the release of the Fellowship of the Ring film in 2001, but most of my friends had. A bunch of us planned to go see it together for our annual Christmastime movie night. The tradition for those movie nights is that we would watch something together and then discuss it afterwards. Since I was totally unfamiliar with the story, I decided to watch it (several times) before our get-together. I think I ended up seeing it 5 times in the theater, all told.

Of course I was hooked. I went out and bought all the Lord of the Rings paperbacks as well as the The Hobbit and read them all in short order. I thoroughly enjoyed them, especially the climax of The Two Towers, where Frodo has been captured by the Orcs and taken to the tower of Cirith Ungol (In the movies, this takes place in Return of the King). It was a great cliffhanger.

Over the years I have re-read the novels numerous times, and read lots of related material. Let's just say that I have become very well-versed in Tolkien.

After Yoli and I got married, I read her The Hobbit aloud. It took a while (weeks, I think) to get through. I wasn't sure it would work — after all, English is her second language. The Hobbit is written more like a children's tale than the Lord of the Rings, but it still has its share of old, unfamiliar words. But Yoli followed the story pretty well, and since it is such a fun story, she seemed to enjoy it.

Since we had our girls, reading has been a big thing for us. Jadzia (so far) seems to have the bigger appetite for books, and in this way she is a lot like me. My mom taught me to read at a young age and over the years I have consumed books with a passion.

Reading modern childrens books is fun. But I think ahead to the days when Jadzia might be old enough to hear a story like The Hobbit. She'll have to have a good memory to remember details of the story from one session to the next. And she'll have to use her imagination since there are only a few illustrations. But it's hard to wait — I want to read it to her now.

To my surprise, after I opened my Father's Day gift, Jadzia immediately wanted to see the illustrations inside. The gift is a box set that includes the two-volume "History of the Hobbit" as well as The Hobbit itself. This hardcover version of The Hobbit is beautiful. It has the original cover design, a striking view of the Lonely Mountain, the Lake, and Mirkwood Forest painted by Tolkien. Inside the book are color reproductions of all Tolkien's illustrations.

So I went through and showed her one-by-one the illustrations in each of the three volumes, describing what was going on in each. So she is now familiar with "Bilbo," "Gandalf," the dwarves, and the dragon.

She was so excited, she even had me read a page or two out of the book. But that was about her limit.

A couple weeks later while we were playing in her room, I came across a set of plastic keys. This prompted me to do a little storytelling about Bilbo's rescue of the dwarves (using barrels) from the prison of the Elf king.

Apparently she liked my version. When she came across the keys again a few days later, she asked me to tell the story again.

Foodies

The differences between siblings are a source of neverending amazement and bewilderment. Jadzia has been picky for quite some time. But Ludi? She eats almost anything. These days she is eating a ton ... probably a growth spurt.

She can be picky in her own way. If we have oatmeal for her to eat, and we are eating dinner (say, sweet and sour chicken with rice), she won't eat the oatmeal. She wants to share in whatever we're taking off our plates and putting into our mouths.

I have to point out, this fills her mom with joy.

Fourth of July weekend

Parades, markets, softball games … It's been an eventful weekend here in the Renaud Empire.

First off, I finally purchased our plane tickets for Bolivia. We successfully used our American Airlines AAadvantage miles to get two almost-free tickets, saving around $2000. We were able to do this because both Yoli and I applied for AA credit cards that offered 25,000 bonus miles if you spent $750 on the card. Those bonus miles were what we needed to get to the magic 40,000 number. The only problem with these tickets is that Yoli has to come home from Bolivia a couple days sooner than she wanted. Another problem, though this is more of a problem with American's declining number of flights from Lambert, is the enormously long layovers we will have to endure this time around in Miami.

On Friday we took the girls to watch Ferguson's Fourth of July Parade. It was pretty good, and Jadzia really seemed entranced (Ludi slept through most of it). My favorite parts were the Scottish Rite drum/bagpipe line and the Shriners zipping around in their little minicars. Yoli shot lots of video, which will be included on a DVD soon. After the parade, we made our way to January Wabash Park for Ferguson's festival. On our way we stopped at the First Baptist Church, where they always have a "cooling station" set up, and got some cookies and visited with some friends. At Wabash Park, I took a minute to look at the war memorial listing names of Ferguson soldiers who died in wars like WWI or Vietnam. None of the activities age-appropriate for our girls had started yet, so we sat on the grass and listened as the Scottish Rite folks played more music. This time we were really, really close and personal. After a bit we got some bratwursts (Jadzia ate a whole one), and finally the petting zoo and pony rides opened. Jadzia was pleased to saddle up for the first time. After such an exhausting morning and afternoon, we went back home, put the girls to sleep, and soon I was off to work. Later in the evening, Yoli took Jadzia outside to watch fireworks.

On Saturday we went to the Farmer's Market and got some peaches and corn and some free food samples. Plus Jadzia planted some carrot seeds in a little pot, courtesy of the Juicy Juice guys who were promoting a new line of fruit/veggie juices.

This Sunday was our week to serve in children's ministry at church, so we didn't get to hear the message. After that we came home and ate some grilled turkey and cheese sandwiches. Jadzia was being very picky and wouldn't eat most of hers. At 2 p.m. I left to go play softball.

Yes, the sky was clear, the sun was hot, and the air was thick with moisture. But the field was dry, and that was all that mattered. It felt good to get out in the field and take some hacks at the plate. In fact, I got my first official hit! (Last week, after our games were rained out, some of us stuck around and played for fun. I went 2-for-4). Alas, it was a losing effort. Two big innings by our opponents early in the game doomed our cause. After that, our defense improved dramatically and we really shut them down. But we couldn't generate enough offense of our own. Well, there's always next week, when we'll play a doubleheader.