Fourth Photo Dump

Morning, all.  It’s July by the way – the cliche “This Year is Going So Fast” just gets realer and realer each year, does it not?  Someone once told me life is like a roll of toilet paper – it goes faster as you get to the end.

Haven’t much time to write, but I wanted to throw a few photos out there from our Fourth.  We stayed in town – I am behind on billing and am feeling the pressure to catch up, so we had to stay here and mix in some work with our play.  In order to break up the weekend, the Prof decided to cash in hotel points and get a local hotel room for Sunday night, so we could use the pool and maybe hang out in the common spaces downstairs and spare ourselves from rattling around inside our apartment for three long days.  Welp, turns out there was a huge festival here this weekend and our entire hotel was essentially a night club – day and night.  Booming club music, packed with drunk people trying to hook up.   Wading through the lobby to the elevator with our three small boys dressed in their jaunty swimsuits, Craig hysterically screaming because it was too loud and scary, was an interesting endeavor.  We do wish the concierge had warned us when we booked that this hotel would be Essence Fest Central, but so it goes.  The pool was largely empty, so we did get to swim at least.

We went swimming Saturday morning (our usual summer routine), and then I got my hair cut Saturday afternoon.  It’s fairly short, for me.  That’s about all I got on that story.

So for the hotel thing, we decided to go Sunday after Craig’s nap.  We spent Sunday morning scrubbing the house top to bottom, with the boys’ help.  Jack was actually quite helpful, hanging up all of the boys’ shirts, and helping move laundry through.  Liam was slightly less helpful, but he did sweep everywhere, with much coaxing.  Craig was a nightmare but we worked around his destruction.  After nap, we headed up to the hotel and sat in crazy Essence Fest traffic for eleventy million hours, then ventured through the intense Hook-up Hotel.  You could hear the club tunes booming through the elevator shaft.  We swam, we fed the boys McDonald’s, and then we drove home and a babysitter met us there.  In hindsight it was probably unnecessarily complicated to go downtown to hotel, come back home to meet sitter, go back downtown for fancy dinner at August (a John Besh restaurant, quite fancy), and then go back home, but that’s what we ended up doing.

I had a Lavender Ford cocktail, and I spent as much time smelling it as I did drinking it.  Heavenly.  We were given a complimentary amuse-bouche of some sort of crunchy thing in the bottom of an eggshell, topped with corn flavored whipped cream.  The corn cream was odd – just an unexpected mix of tastes – but it was free and I’ll try anything.  We had an appetizer of crawfish tart – big crawfish, giant sweet peas, and sauce sort of loosely piled in a tart crust – it clearly had not been baked together, as it was more like a pie-bowl full of saucy crawfish, than a pot pie.  It was quite tasty, though, and quite unusual which is usually my goal for eating out – I want something I can’t make myself.  Our main course was pompano with some sort of sauce, topped with crab and crawfish (nom, that’s mine in the pic above although we switched halfway through).  The Prof got a blackfish with some asparagus topping which I liked fine but not quite as much.  I perused the wine list but in the end had a canebrake ale with my fish, which was quite tasty. To top it off, we split a fancy take on banana pudding – a toasted flat marshmallow coated the plate, then was topped with sliced grilled bananas, nilla wafer ice cream, and peanut butter powder which was literally powder, but immediately turned into peanut butter in your mouth.  I’d take that and the Lavender Ford every day of my life if I could do it.

After dinner, the Prof sent me packing off to our hotel room to have a relaxing night and morning on my own, and he went home to watch the boys.  Keeping the boys in that room all night all together would have been a nightmare, so we really just used the room for the pool.   And we might have done more hotel exploring and eating and such had it not been so packed, but anyway it worked out because I had a great night’s sleep in a giant fluffy bed, woke early and billed a good 4 hours in peace and then read 50 pages of a book for pleasure, and then the boys came and picked me up and we went to the Riverwalk and its attached mall to buy some shoes and lunch before heading home.

While in the mall food court, I sent Jack away to buy his and his brothers’ pizza, while we got burritos for the adults.  I’ll admit that after initially sending him off on his own, I wandered that direction and hovered a bit close, mostly because there were lines and I didn’t want to make things difficult for the workers.  Plus I could just see him trying to stack three cups of lemonade on a tray and then dropping the whole shebang, which I wasn’t feeling like paying for.  But I think he’s got the hang of it and next time I won’t be anywhere near.  It was too funny once he’d managed it all and came back beaming – he became Mr. Confident Know It All for a little while, confidently instructing his brothers on how to be grown up like him.  And then Liam promptly melted into a miserable puddle on the ground because he wanted to go buy something on his own too.

After coming home for Craig’s nap, we headed back out downtown for yet a third time, to see the fireworks – luckily we’re only about three miles from downtown, so all the back and forth is not so crazy as it may sound.  New Orleans has a fireworks show of dueling barges on the Mississippi river, and we headed into my firm’s parking garage (which has open air sides), backed into a spot, and watched from the back of the car, like a drive in movie.

The show was the perfect length, and then we only waited probably half an hour to get through the crowds and heading home.  The two big boys fell asleep on the drive home, while Craig stayed wide awake and chatty the whole way home.  All of them settled right into bed upon our arrival home, and thus went our Fourth of July.

Now I’m off to bill some more.   However, given my lovely hotel stay sans kids, I’ve got more energy for all of this this week.  Happy belated Fourth to you and yours, friends!