Winter... Brrr!

Ok, so I'm officially cold now. It's been cold here in New Orleans for longer than I'd like to admit, and I am starting to feel fussy about it. The winter coats we bought for the girls last year have been invaluable. My mom even had to send me my sweaters and warm coats that I'd been keeping at her house in Seattle since I never had a chance to wear them in Miami.

I am painfully behind in blogging, so here is a recap of our first Christmas in NOLA! We moved into our permanent home here on Dec 12th. Right, so I wouldn't recommend moving two weeks before Christmas. No time to unpack, no time to decorate for Christmas, no time to keep my head on straight. We were thrilled to get our tree up (just lights, no ornaments this year) and get some Christmas cards out in the mail.

Now that we share a house with the Carlson family (Chad and Cindy and their boys, Andrew (8) and Nicholas (6) ), we had the joy of getting to see not just two but four little kiddos excited about Christmas morning. We had breakfast all together and opened stockings. Then some time with just our family opening all the presents from the grandparents. Later in the afternoon we went to "the blue house" across the street. Mike and Susanne Brantley, along with their boys Logan (11) and Jordan (10) and Adam Nevins (an old friend from Crossroads) live across the street in a blue house. Hence the name. We often have our big events at their house since they have a bit more space to accomodate the 30-40 people that show up for a Christmas dinner. We also have Matthew's Table at their house each Thursday night.

The Blue House, at night

Note for future reference: Boudin is a kind of creole sausage. I will not be eating said sausage EVER again, as it gave both Chad and I horrible food poisoning the day after Christmas. I spent most of the day after Christmas under a pile of blankets. Yuck!!

Our post-Christmas days were spent catching up on rest, especially since my works days between Thanksgiving and New Years consisted of cooking non-stop between 6:45am and 5:15pm. We did finally venture out to ride the St Charles Streetcar line with the girls. We drive along St Charles avenue each day on the way to the girls' preschool, and with how much they love trains, they'd been begging to ride the streetcar for quite a while. There is a "Desire Street" here in New Orleans, and this streetcar line is where "Streetcar Named Desire" is from.

Here are a few shots of our adventure...

The houses along St Charles are insanely huge and gorgeous mansions

Isabella was more than excited to ride a "train"

St Charles is lined on either side by beautiful live oak trees that survived Hurricane Katrina. The grassy space in the middle of St Charles is called "the neutral ground" (more history on that in another post), and probably 18 hours a day find people running alongside the streetcar rails. I love that our neighborhood has so much history and character!!