Louisiana Christmas in Pictures

We spent 16 days in Louisana over the Christmas holiday. I was going to write a big blog post covering all the details but I realized quickly that such an entry would be 15 pages front and back and ain't nobody got time for that. Since pictures say 1000 words, I'd figure I'd just let the images we captured during our stay do the talking for me. Here we go:

The flight to New Orleans went relatively well despite the fact that we were delayed on the ground for 2 hours and missed our connecting flight. We ended up making it to nola 2 hours later than planned and our luggage miraculously made it with us. 

The first order of business was of course riding on Pops' tractor.

Pops had delayed decorating his John Deere with Christmas lights so that Forest could get a joy ride in beforehand. Though I think Forest honestly enjoyed looking at the bedazzled tractor just as much as he liked riding it.

My parents have a great park about 1 mile from their house so we spent a lot of time there with Forest. The best part? It was fully fenced in so we didn't have to worry about our Flight Risk making an escape (though he certainly walked the fence perimeters several times looking for a way out). 

If Pops' first order of business was taking the kid on a tractor ride, then Nana's priority was getting him a snowball. As you can tell, he was thrilled with that idea.

On a rainy day we met up with cousin Rayne and Jon's side of the family for a trip to the Aquarium in New Orleans. It was packed with school groups but the babies still had fun looking at all the sea life. The biggest hits were the penguins, seahorses and sharks, although Forest declared that the sharks were 'scary'.

It was an exhausting outing and Forest fell asleep within 5 seconds of the drive home.

One of the main reasons for our trip home was my BFFs wedding. My parents kept Forest for the weekend while Jon and I were in Lafayette partaking in wedding duties. This deserves it's own post so more on the wedding later....

Ohmygosh how beautiful is April??????!!!!!!

While

 While we were in Lafayette, Forest came down with a mystery fever. In the end we concluded it was teething, although these final molars are coming in excruciatingly slow. He wasn't himself for the final week of the trip. He was clingy and shy and cried almost as much as he did when he had colic. It was rough and he required lots of TLC and quiet time away from everyone. Our little introvert.

 

I tried to work on my Bokeh photography but Forest refused to humor me. 

This guy was much more cooperative:

 Even Elmo was a joy to work with:

 For Christmas week we headed down to Cut Off to spend some time with Jonathan's family. The weather was muggy and rainy most of the time but we had fun anyway, getting frozen yogurt....

 Coloring with Uncle Justin....

 and playing with Parker (aka the best cat ever).

 Parker was my cat back in college, but when we ended up moving around so much, Jon's parents offered to foster him indefinitely. He was raised with Bailey so thinks he's a dog. 
 
In fact, he and Samson (who thinks he's a cat) have almost identical personalities. 

After being cooped up for a few days we decided to just let Forest have a grand old time playing in the mud at a nearby park. I don't think I've ever seen him happier.

 That night, Jon's parents put Forest to bed so that we  could go out for Crawfish. Yum! Too bad that night I either had the stomach flu or food poisoning and spent the night on the bathroom floor and was out of commission nearly all of Christmas Eve.

I was able to peel myself out of bed long enough for church where we had a nice reunion with Jon's best friends from highschool and their lovely families.

After church Forest enjoyed his first experience with fireworks.

 Christmas was hot! We traded in Forest's tacky Christmas sweater for a Mickey Mouse T-shirt.

After having breakfast and opening presents with Jonathan's family we packed up and drove back to Covington to have Christmas lunch with my extended family. I somehow ended up with zero pictures of this. I think by this point Forest was so overwhelmed by all the hooplah and people that he retreated to his room for most of the day. 

The rest of the trip was a bit more quiet and relaxing and we just spent time swimming and watching Rudolph. 

Then before we knew it, it was time to pack up and leave the tropical temps of Louisiana for the frigid air of North Cali. 

Our flight home was ROUGH, but that's another post in itself....

Thanks to all the friends and family who made time to see us during our stay! See y'all soon, I hope!