Mardi Gras Mayhem

The mayhem of Mardi Gras is finally over!  We live in the thick of the uptown parade route and Mardi Gras week brought us lots of extra traffic, sirens, helicopters, fireworks, loud music, beads, and trash.  This is just the "family friendly" scene, and of course we stayed far away from the sloppier scene down on Bourbon Street.  Sounds like a great place to raise a family, heh?  Kiran took it all in stride, doing double takes at some of the funny costumes, and bopping his head to the marching bands.  He managed to sleep through most of the late night noise on our street.  And he made sure we were up and at 'em to see the 8am parades on Fat Tuesday.

We joined in a walking parade on Sunday called "The Box of Wine" parade.  This was a spoof on the big Bacchus parade it preceded.   Unlike Bacchus at WPI (EtOH free group), Bacchus in Nola has a reputation for being wild.  The "Box of Wine" parade was just wild enough for us.  There was a klezmer band playing cover songs and everyone was dressed in wine-themed costumes.   Most people were toting boxes of wine, but we were hauling water bottles and cereal puffs.  We decorated a diaper box to look like a big box of wine and strapped it to the front of Kiran's stroller.  The parade went down St Charles Ave and ended at the park near our house.  Kiran was pretty quiet for most of the parade, smiling up at us, and laughing at some of the costumes.

On Tuesday we walked around and watched some of the traditional Zulu parade.  Kiran wore his ferocious lion costume.  It was such a big hit on Halloween that we decided to give it another run.  He appreciated it more this time and he laughed when he saw himself in the mirror.  Kiran raked in a few fun "throws" at the parade: a plastic cigar that puffs air when you squeeze it, a blue stuffed seal, and a purple stuffed alien.  Hopefully he won't get too attached to any of these trinkets.  He seemed to enjoy watching the floats go by and he had fun dancing to the music.  We were out walking for about 2 hours and got Kiran home just in time to take a seat on his potty.  He refused to use the port-a-potty on St Charles ;)

After a few days of over-indulging on all things New Orleans, we are ready for Lent to begin.  In keeping with the spirit of things, we decided to make a few sacrifices.  We are gladly saying goodbye to king cake, pecan pie, gumbo, pork ribs, hubig's pies, moon pies, zapp's potato chips, and blue bell ice cream.  And I'm saying goodbye to poor parenting during Mardi Gras... no more loud parades, irregular naps, trinket collecting, and late night shenanigans ... until next year.