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Mom's Nag Pad is a place of support for women and moms. I hope that while you're reading the stories about the crazy lives of others, you'll remember yourself and pick up that dream deferred. Like me, everyone should indulge a dream!

Monday, February 28, 2011

Happy Mardi Gras!!


Every year, about this time in the Crescent City, New Orleanians are enjoying and bemoaning the run up to Fat Tuesday. When you live in another state and are watching the festivities on the news, it does look like a lot of fun and in essence, it is. But we get to live the annoying part of Carnival as well; the impossible traffic, those extra days off for the kids, and those New Year's diets which are thrown off track again! The kids are excited to catch all the beads and stuffed animals which they'll play with for thirty seconds and then leave all over the living room floor.

Still, it's one of those things that makes us unique. It's funny to realize that businesses all around the country are open except in New Orleans, and a few other places in the South. Our children are raised believing that everyone is celebrating Mardi Gras (what a horrible shock this was to those kids who lived outside New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina). When Wednesday comes, the faithful will go off to church for Ash Wednesday, and the rest of us suffering from hangovers, gluttony and fatigue, will call in sick. The trees along St. Charles and Carrollton will be dripping with beads for weeks afterwards and there will be mad scrambles for the last King Cakes at Walgreens.

And as tired as we'll be from Mardi Gras 2011, it won't be long before we'll be thinking about Mardi Gras 2012.