Happy Mardi Gras!

We like to do a little something to celebrate Mardi Gras day at our house.  Tuesdays are usually busy for us and this one was no exception.  I had to drive back and forth to dance and Clayton in Sandy three times this Tuesday between 4:00 and 7:00!  It's usually not that crazy in one night, but Lainie had an extra rehearsal sandwiched in between Anna's two hour class.  Normally I would also have Young Women on a Tuesday, but this week it was on a Wednesday.  All the car time made Garrett crash, which usually doesn't bode well for getting him to bed at a decent hour.  (I thought it was so cute how he was resting his cheek on his hand.)  I'd normally try to run to the store and stay in the area of the classes, but I kept going back home to work on these:

And to work on dinner here and there.  Mark finally got home and kindly made the last pick up so I could finish frosting these and get serious about getting dinner put together.  My kids absolutely LOVE king cake.  I do too.  I was hoping to make shrimp creole or try making jambalaya for the first time, but I finally got smart and realized the night was too crazy to make a New Orleans main dish happen.  At least we got the king cakes done! We kept one for ourselves and brought the other two to friends.  Lainie was thrilled to get the baby in the very first piece.

This week we are thinking of our home in New Orleans-not just our house-the whole city, the wonderful life we lived there for almost six years.  I am thankful every day for that part of our life.  I remember a few weeks after getting there in 2001, I was driving my two little girls to the Children's Museum in downtown New Orleans.  I was driving through a kind of yucky part of town and thinking to myself, "How am I going to survive six years here?" It was only a month or two later that I began to discover the gems of New Orleans that we miss to this day: The Aquarium, the Zoo, the French Quarter, the waterfront, Cafe du Monde, streetcars, the Garden District, amazing food, charm, character, shotgun houses painted in bright colors, beautiful white egrets with yellow beaks wandering the many canals and ditches along the streets, geckos and lizards climbing around the ferns in our yard (and sometimes surprising us in our house!), and most of all, wonderful friends from our church and schools.  That list doesn't even cover it all.

Anna helped me sort through the rest of the beads we had gotten out for our Mardi Gras party, tie them in bunches so they wouldn't be a tangled mess next year, and get them boxed up for the basement.  I shouldn't admit it took me more than a week after my party to get that done! My table is finally cleared off with no tablecloth-just how I like it, the Mardi Gras stuff is all put away, and the house is clean.

I liked Lainie's creative way of carrying three pairs of shoes up to her room at once.  That is what one of my high school math teachers would have called a "higher order primate." Nice work Lainie!