Flying out tomorrow

We're off to Calgary in a couple hours and will then fly out tomorrow morning, stopping to see the kids' grandparents and Aunt Sandy in Toronto for a 3-hour visit.  The full flight will take us 24 hours. 
Danika's best friend, Agathe (from France) is meeting Danika at the airport in Ouagadougou and is VERY excited to see her again. 
Once we get to the guesthouse where we'll stay in Ouagadougou, Asher is planning to make a mini mud hut (a crèche) in the front yard, like he used to make with his friends in the month before Christmas.  These huts are the Burkina version of the Christmas Nativity scene.  To make this, the kids use an empty sardine can to form the mud bricks and then let the bricks bake in the sun before using them to build the walls.  So we'll be eating lots of sardines in the first couple days there (well, Asher will be...! I'm going to be eating the Burkina corn-mush, called "toe", eaten dipped in a sauce.) 
And Kenai has already started reverting to the games that he used to play in Burkina - like pretending to be a meat cutter at the meat market.  He uses a knife (although he'd be much happier if we had a real machete) to hack off chunks of play-doh "meat" for me to buy from him. 
The meat market in Ouagadougou is one destination on our "to-do" list.  It's a bustling market of swinging meat cutters, loud and cheerful women selling fruits and vegetables, jostling buyers, hungry vultures waiting on the side for scraps of meat and HOPEFULLY some nice mangoes just waiting for us to pass by!  It's not mango season right now but we're planning to scour the markets to see whether we can't find some mangoes that are imported from a neighboring country.  Oh, and about those vultures - one of the first things that we need to do when we get to Burkina is buy Asher a slingshot so that he can practice his target shooting as we pass the vultures.  The plentiful little lizards that sun themselves on the brick walls of houses also make great targets.
So I think that we're ready, with many plans as to what we'd like to do in Burkina and who we'd like to see.  Enjoy your snow! ;)
Tany