The Extraordinary Renaud Family

You can follow our three-week sojourn in Bolivia by checking out our Amazing Adventures in Bolivia blog.

My nephews came to stay in town with my parents for four days. It has been a fun time for our girls. The first two days we went over to Nanny's house to play.

The girls love any excuse to see their Nanny and play in a different locale. But the addition of their two cousins to the mix makes for icing on the cake.

Today the weather was so amazing that I could no longer put off a small project I have long wanted to embark on: finding family gravestones at Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis.

A few comments from Jadzia about how she enjoyed "Beauty and the Beast," her first show at the Muny:

"I liked when the Beast gave her the library.

"When he turned back into a prince. The fireworks turned him into a prince.

"I liked every song that Belle sang.

"I liked the castle set and I liked how the Beast's costume looked.

"I liked seeing the Beast with the binoculars. He was the same size but he was better to see. I could see him really well."

We now has passports in hand for Josie and Joseph. I was surprised how fast they processed the applications. In fact, they did it so quickly, we may have enough time to apply for Bolivia visas for them.

So now my attention turns to other things, like how the heck we are going to survive travel in a plane with four children, two of whom will be on our laps.

Yeah, we are taking them as lap kids. I mean, there's really no way around it. The tickets are going to run about $1100-1200 apiece, and I am willing to endure 8 hours of insanity on a plane to save a couple grand.

Plus, there is a decent chance they will put us at the back of the plane with some empty seats, at least on the flight to Bolivia. If that happens, BONUS.

I came across a cool blog entry today about a clip toy a mom made for her toddler. This looks like something that's right up Josie's alley:

I think I'll try to make one myself.

Here's a collage of photos we took of Joseph, trying to find one we could submit with his passport application. These photos are taken from two different sessions, as you can tell by his clothes and the backgrounds.

Later this year we are planning to visit Bolivia. It has been two years -- and two babies! -- since our last trip there.

In the past we have always shot our own photos for passports. Heck, I did my own passport this way even before I met Yoli, sending in a (pretty bad) snapshot taken against a wall that I happened to have two of.

Taking photos of babies and toddlers can be pretty tricky. And each round of photos we took had some problem that made me decide to redo them. So we ended up with almost 100 photos of Joseph and Josie before all was said and done.

For the heck of it, I decided to grab six photos of each child and make a little collage. Josie's is maybe a little more interesting since she was making all sorts of faces.

My day at the Ferguson farmer's Market started early this week.

I got up at 7:40 in order to get there right when the market opened. Yoli needed fresh strawberries for her entry in the strawberry contest that would be held 2 hours later.

Just to re-assure everyone that Joseph is alive and well. The dearth of photos here is purely a result of our being very busy and sleep-deprived.

Joseph is a very pleasant baby overall, though he is beginning to enter his more fussy stage. Also this week he seems to have had some sort of virus which ultimately led to two trips to the doctor's office. (One of those visits lasted all morning as I took him around DePaul getting blood tests, x-rays, etc)

He is just fine, no cause for alarm. But whenever babies have fevers (even slight ones), doctors get very concerned and want to make sure it's not something serious.

Anyway, here are some photos from different things that have been going on our life in April and May.