Light of Togo

As I’ve mentioned a couple times before, Joshua has fit right in with the Togolese people and culture.  He seems to handle change and new experiences very well.  One of those new experiences is fufu.  He tried it for the first time just a couple months after our arrival here, and he loved it.  This shocked me, since I can’t stand the stuff!  It’s a nearly-tasteless, chalky, pasty, gooey substance that  you dip in some sort of sauce.

Well, Joshua likes it so much that he asked our house helper, Yvette, to make it for him.  She was very glad to do so, and Joshua was very glad to eat it!  Here’s a short video of her preparing it, Joshua trying to help, and Joshua eating it.  You’ll notice that they mash it up in a wooden bowl using a large wooden stick.  They slowly add more and more water until it becomes very pasty.  The best way to describe the texture is wet Playdoh!

Joshua’s fufu from Jesse Shanks on Vimeo.

The other night as I was moving all our boxes from upstairs to downstairs where they’d be loaded on the truck the following day, I thought to myself, “Hey, why not have some fun while I’m giving myself a ruptured tendon?” So, I did. I set up my camera and took a shot or two after moving each box, then I later put them together to make a time-lapse video. Enjoy!

NOTE: If the video seems to play too fast (in just a few seconds) you might have to play it again in order for it to play correctly. This happened to me a couple times so hopefully you don’t have any problem with it.

Never Ending Boxes from Jesse Shanks on Vimeo.

This is a quick update of what we’ve been doing while in Québec, and of where we’re headed in the next several months.

RELATED LINKS:
•Blog posts about our Togo departure progress
•Fund-raiser page
•www.day6images.com

A couple months ago, Tiffany started Kindergarten with Joshua and they have both been working very hard.  One part of the morning routine is to say the Pledge of Allegiance with the small paper crayon-colored American flag hanging on the schoolroom wall.  It was already extremely cute to hear him mispronounce some of the big words which he is incapable of defining, but when he recently lost his first tooth upper tooth (fifth overall) it became even cuter.  Here’s a short video of his Pwedge of Allegianthe.

The Pwedge of Allegianthe from Jesse Shanks on Vimeo.

It seems that ever since the summer started, we have been going non-stop. In all the busyness though, we’ve managed to take advantage of the sometimes nice weather and do some really fun things together. I fully intended to write blog entries about each one of them as they happened, but blogging often has to take a back seat to other things.

So, here is a whole summer of fun wrapped up in one long blog post. I have included two different kinds of photo slideshows that I’m experimenting with so please let me know if you have any difficulty viewing them.
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ow, I can’t believe it’s been a week since Joshua’s and my camping trip. I really wanted to have the video done and this entry written right after we returned last Saturday, but between lots of work to catch up on, taking longer on the video than expected, and incredibly annoying frustrations with uploading it to Google Video, I have just now got around to it. I know that since last weekend you’ve all been sitting at your computers in anxious expectation of this moment, so I do apologize for keeping you from your TV and other important things.  I hope you do know that I’m just kidding about TV being an important thing.  Of course, everyone knows that video games are much more important.

The camping was really a blast.  Although the mosquitoes were almost unbearable - we couldn’t even sit down long enough to eat - we really enjoyed ourselves and had a great time.  I asked Joshua what the funnest thing is that he’s ever done in his extremely long life, and he said it was this camping trip.  That right there made all the mosquito bites worth it!

OK, enough babbling.  You probably just want to watch the video.  It is really quite a lot longer (13 minutes!) than I wanted it to be, but when putting it together I just couldn’t cut out so many of the cute things that Joshua did or said, so 13 minutes it is!  Because of the aforementioned problem with Google, I am trying a different video hosting service called Vimeo.  Hopefully I’ll have better luck with it than I have with Google.

You can watch it in full screen by clicking the squarish-looking arrows just to the right of the volume.

Jesse and Joshua’s Camping Trip from Jesse Shanks on Vimeo.

And here’s some photos:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Following the ancient Scottish traditions of our Shanks forefathers, Joshua and I constructed quite a handsome snowman a little over a week ago. We had been waiting all winter for the perfect snowman conditions, since they are very picky as to the type of snow that they like to be made of. Every time it snows here in Quebec, it is very dry and powdery snow that is impossible to make anything with. However, after a recent rain the top 3 inches of snow became optimal snowman material. Once he was finished, we enjoyed seeing his smiling face from our back window for a few days, but then disaster struck. Watch the video below to see how the saga unfolded.

Somebody sent this to me quite a while ago, and I just found it again on my computer. I thought it was so funny that I had to show all of you.

Before moving to Québec, we heard about how bad the winters can be, but we had no idea what we were in store for! With winter only half over, we’ve already accumulated 59 inches of snow on the ground. That’s almost 5 feet! The snow plows generally do a good job of keeping the roads clear, but all of that snow has to go somewhere. A lot of it just keeps getting pushed to the curbs, which haven’t been visible since sometime in November, where the snow banks look more like white walls in a house than piles of snow. What’s interesting is that they actually will load the snow into huge trucks that transport the white white fluffy goodness by the ton to large areas which resemble trash landfills. These mini snow mountains would be great for sledding!

Here’s a video of one of the recent blizzards and some other winter scenes:

If you cannot view this video, click here for instructions.During the first big blizzard back in December, I grabbed the camera and went out to our balcony. It just so happened that this poor lady was walking, or trying to, through the snow back to her apartment. I was about to go down and help her out when she finally got back onto the path.

In the rankings of the all-time most exciting childhood experiences, loosing the first tooth has to be at least in the top ten. Because Joshua wasn’t even five yet at the time, we were surprised when he told us, “My tooth is bending!”

He got so excited about his “bent” tooth that he made up a song about it! Here’s a video of him singing his yoof toos song and the extraction of his first calcium deposit.

If you cannot view this video, click here for instructions.