Mother's Day New Orleans Style

We had a great Mother's Day!!! It was so special to be able to celebrate with Jackson and my mom at the same time! Jackson slept in Mimi's room after the wedding and she got up with him for a little while in the morning. That was definitely a nice bonus :) She and I kept him busy and started in on the yummy muffins from the farmer's market while Josh slept. Jackson definitely wanted to go, go, go as early as we had been, but we were waiting until a bit later to catch the streetcar that would take us to the Audubon Zoo. I was looking forward to this outing, and was pretty excited about the $3 off coupon I had! LOL We had such a nice surprise when paying admission--my mom and I were free for Mother's Day! The woman selling tickets asked if we had any mothers in our group and I told her two. I just thought she was going to give us a coupon for the gift shop or something, but she told me it would just be $10.50 for Josh! What a lovely surprise :)










Jackson had fallen asleep on the walk from the streetcar stop, through the park (Audubon Park, I think), to the zoo, so we walked all the way to the far end of the zoo to start our sightseeing. We figured Jackson wouldn't miss anything that way and we might avoid some crowds. That was an excellent idea, if I do say so myself! The exhibits were very well done and there was even some music piped in! Mr. Jackson definitely let us know that he was reaching the limit of this vacation with a few meltdowns while at the zoo, but overall he was holding up really well! He's a trooper, for sure! We had lunch at the zoo cafe and it was really yummy! A pretty good bargain compared to the other places we had been eating! Once we had seen everything we wanted to see, we walked back across the park to the streetcar stop and rode back to the hotel. Jackson had a grand time sticking his head out the window and checking out passing streetcars :)

We weren't quite sure what we wanted to do for dinner. We figured since we'd be going on the early side, we might not have to contend with too much Mother's Day busyness... I asked for a recommendation at the front desk of the hotel and was given the name of Oceana Grill. Even though it was a tad further than we wanted to walk, we headed over there anyways. I am SO glad we did! We sat in the little outdoor courtyard and enjoyed the beautiful weather (the whole day was gorgeous!). Our waiter was great and the food was delicious! I had barbecue shrimp and the sauce it was in was fabulous dipping sauce for bread. Josh had a yummy pasta dish with lots of seafood in it. Mom had fried eggplant, I think, and it was even good! After dinner we walked around the French Quarter for a bit and I finally got my drink to go: a Hurricane Daquiri :) It was quite tasty!