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Maddie and Ivana sing

Here's my daughter Madalyn playing her guitar and singing with family friend Ivana a song the two of them made up called l'Oiseau (the Bird).

It's a silly little thing, but I like it. Ivana is singing lead, Maddie is playing guitar and singing harmony.

And I get to be a proud dad who shows off his daughter's budding talent. But Ivana is not my daughter, and I still say she has a wonderful voice.

Sorry, it's in French. But music is music. If it skips when you play it it's because the playing has gotten ahead of the downloading. Just drag the thing back to the beginning so it plays from an earlier point.

Download loiseau_2.wav

Maddie dance singing

This is several months old, but our oldest got to do something cool at the end-of-the year dance recital in June.

Her dance instructor, upon hearing that Madalyn sings at church, asked her if she would sing something for the recital. They settled on Amazing Grace. And the instructor wanted all the verses.

You might be able to check it out here.  Download amazing_grace.WMV

That's the whole reason I'm doing this post, to see how easily better quality clips like this can be shared here. Let me know, again, whether it works. And, if not, let me know what kind of connection speed you have, etc.Thanks.

Ben birthday clip

If I did a video clip, how would it work?

Here's a clip from Ben's birthday party the other day. Sorry, it's all in French. And the quality is not the greatest since I wanted it to be a small enough file for you to download quickly.

Ben's friend William is there, along with Marie, her husband and two of her kids, Stevan and Ivana.

Download birthday_party_with_some_friends.WMV

Let me know if you are able to see it. I want to be able to use clips in the future.

Pope Daddy

I've been meaning to write for a while, but it took my daughter and a language error to get me to do it.

When the new pope was named yesterday, my oldest wanted to know why they wanted a rap singer to lead the Catholic church.

Ha. Rap singer.

No, honey. They didn't say rap singer.

We had a good laugh imagining a Saturday Night Live sketch around this.

TV comes to the hood

It wasn't the first time they've shot a movie or something in our neighborhood, but this was the biggest deal we've seen yet.

Wednesday the street was lined with trucks and production vehicles and our market area was used to film a scene from a French TV show called Soeur Therèse (Sister Theresa).

It's a show about a former police detective turned nun. She keeps getting drawn back into police work for some reason or another to solve crimes. I have never seen it, but find the idea for the show interesting from a cultural perspective.

Not exactly what you would expect from a society that is often considered to be anti-religion and anti-church. Some TV executive is banking on the idea that enough people out there would want to see a show about a crime-solving nun, so what's that say?

Anyway, you can check out the photos we took as well as the TV show's website. When you click on it you get a nun sound. How fun!

The site is in French, but you get the general idea of the show from the pictures. Doesn't look like an award winner to me. 

Throwback cereal

Thanks to my sister Cathy who sent us several boxes of a throwback breakfast cereal from our past.

Our kids had Quisp this morning for breakfast. They just don't make it like this anymore. Kickin it oldschool in the hizz-ouse!

Ben's shark head

Check out Ben's latest creation. Our aspiring film director got it in his mind to create a movie prop and came up with the head for a shark from his favorite movie Jaws.

Check out the little photo album.

Tragedy

Please send some prayers this way.

While teaching English class from the school across the street from our apartment, Jenny and her class witnessed a suicide attempt.

A teenage girl jumped from the 6th floor of the building across from the classroom Jen was teaching in. It was just outside their window.

We're not sure if the girl died or not, but it was of course pretty shocking. Please pray for the family and for the students.

When the girl fell, Jen gasped and ran to the window. The students followed suit.

Some of the students responded to the shock by giggling, which compounded the shock for Jen. Still in a daze, she reprimanded them and reminded them that no matter what their religion -- most of the kids are Muslim -- they should respect the fact that a soul might be leaving this world and that someone might be losing a loved one.

Later, of course, she realized that kids handle shock differently. For some, it was probably like a scene from a film. Jen felt bad for getting on them, but who can be prepared for such a thing? How do you prepare for how to respond to a suicide when you're in front of a class of 25 10-year-olds?

Someone quickly put a blanket over the girl. Later, the emergency people were using oxygen, so we're not sure whether she survived or not.

Perhaps the worst part for Jen, she said, was the indifference among some of her colleagues when she shared with them what happened. It was a tough day.

Thanks for your prayers.

No longer an alien

After nine years this was the last thing we were expecting to get in the mail.

It was in an envelope from the police commissioner's office, which made us wonder whether we had some unpaid parking ticket from five years ago when we actually had a car.

This is going to be a bill for a hundred kazillion euros. Man. Just what we need now.

Anyway, cool surprise. We open it up and it's from the immigration office. They were informing us of the acceptance of our request to have me, Madalyn and Benjamin regrouped with Jenny as full French residents.

This is big for two reasons.

First off, it opens the door to a load of financial rights that we never had before. You see, this is a socialist country. So taxes are very high but the money is redistributed to people through various programs and allocations.

We've always paid the taxes, but because Maddie, Ben and I were considered mere visitors (nine years is a heckuva lot of time to see the Eiffel tower and the Louvre!) we didn't have the right to any of this stuff.

We were 0-for-the-decade when it came to trying to get stuff. Family allocation? No. Only for Olivia who was born here. And sense the allocation starts giving substantial amounts when you have three kids, it wasn't worth doing. ... Back-to-school allocation. Same deal. ... Help for large families. No deal. Dad's an alien. ... The kids say that's still true.

Anyway, now, pending a physical, we will be able to receive these and other amounts. Unfortunately we can't get back pay for any of it. We literally missed out on thousands of euros over the years, and while paying the taxes!

Second big plus. I will now have the right to work. This creates possibilities for us other than "go back to the States" for getting out of the financial hole we've been steadily sinking into ever since the dollar went south against the euro.

I would prefer to continue full-time with what I'm doing -- so many relationship doors are already open -- but it's nice to have some options to increasing our income if necessary. Even while continuing full-time making disciples, there are jobs that I can do.

Of course, let's not get ahead of ourselves. They still have to call us to schedule that physical, and then to give us the results and the official papers. ... That could take, say, another two years!

Thanks for praying about this!

Film project

To finish up our August flurry of activity, we hosted International Teams colleagues Rick Knox and Michael Williamson for a film project.

Rick is a longtime overseer for us currently stationed in Great Britain and Michael and his wife April are currently raising funds in hopes of joining our team here in Paris.

Rick and Michael recently attended a conference on using video effectively and they came up with the idea of doing a video to help us find the additional funds we need to stay here.

They were here shooting from August 20 to 26. Never did I think that talking in front of a camera could be so hard.