Life with Sydney Harper: Where to begin?.....

Let's see.......sold our house, put Syd in preschool after our nanny decided to go back to college, put in my notice at work, moved to West Hollywood and finally quite my job to start my new role of SAHM (stay at home mom). Considering it has been a year or entire trip around the sun since my last blog post, I wasn't sure where to even begin trying to recap all that's been happening with us. So many changes, but mostly in the past 3 months or so, so that seemed like a good place to start. :-)

I've been mostly not working since Valentine's Day when I went from full time to part time consulting for my company Smashbox. A month and a half has flown by, but I do have a good sense of what being a SAHM feels like and I absolutely LOVE it! I always knew I would, and dreamt of doing it after Syd was born, but just didn't think it was in our cards to make it a reality. We would talk about how nice it would be for me to be at home with her and how we wished it could happen, but with our already slightly above our means mortgage there was no way we could do it, or so we thought. Finally one day we decided if we wanted it to happen bad enough we just had to go for it and stop dreaming "if only". This was the turning point for us and things just fell into place from there. Thank you to our friend and relator Pete for successfully selling our house after a long year of the ups and downs of a short sale! We closed in January and moved to our new two bedroom apartment in West Hollywood. We definitely traded space for location, but a trade we are fine with as our new area has tons of walkable shops, restaurants, a great library and parks.

After we were in escrow, I was able to give my notice at work which was surreal. I was sad about leaving the people I work with who have become dear friends, but aside from that I was ready to be full time mommy and wife and no longer feeling spread thin trying to balance it all with a full time job. I gave a really long notice to my company, two and a half months, as I was covering for my counter part who was on maternity leave and knew my boss was going to be on her own maternity leave soon as well. I just couldn't leave my company in a poor position and felt it was the right thing to do to ensure the smoothest transition. My last official day was March 20th and I turned in my computer and phone on the 21st and said sayanara to my old career self and helloooo to the new domesticated me! That same week was also the start of a class Syd and I enrolled in called "Tiny Tots". It's through the city of West Hollywood and it's a 2 hour class from 10am-12noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays with 19 other toddlers ages 1 1/2-3 years old. We do art projects, singing, dancing and free play. It's perfect for us, allowing Syd time to interact with kids her age and allowing mommy to socialize with other moms of kids her age. Other than that we are doing lots of things we didn't have time for before like running, hiking, checking out the local parks and local children's museum. We also finally went to the beach which we hadn't done in a really long time. It's so nice to be able to spend more time together as a family now too. Seth and I always had opposite schedules so we were often passing each other in and out the door and didn't have a lot of together time with Sydney. This new life we have feels like a long well deserved vacation for us!

Below are pics, starting from our beach trip in the beginning of March and working backwards to Syd's 2nd birthday party in November. This way if you read the blog from the beginning it will be in chronological order. Although a lot happened in between my last blog post and Syd's 2nd birthday, it's just too much to try and recap a whole year so some things have to be left out. I plan to update the blog on a regular basis so I will do another post soon, but here's plenty to catch up on for now.

Our trip to Santa Monica Beach. It was actually a pretty windy cold day so we had the beach all to ourselves. It was pretty amazing.

Nice job Daddy for catching this shot...

Syd found a shell!

Mommy spots a ladybug!

Love those precious sandy toes.

Syd and Louis during a recent evening in Chinatown.

Sydney and I go to the farmers market every Sunday in Studio City, near where we used to live in the Valley. It's the only fm that caters to kids with pony rides, jump houses, a petting zoo, train ride and more. It has lots of great produce and prepared food booths as well. Sydney gets to pick two things to do each time we go and almost always wants to ride a pony. I love seeing how happy she gets when she gets her wish.

Recently after the market, we stopped in our old hood and visited our neighbors Christine and Chris and their son Benjamin. He and Sydney have known each other since birth basically (Benjamin is a few months older) so it's adorable to see them together at this age.

Sydney at Drum Circle in Van Nuys. This happens every Saturday morning, but is a little trek for us so we go maybe once a month now. It's free and usually there are close to 50 kids there so it's lots of fun and very LOUD! :-)

We recently checked out the Zimmer Jewish Children's Museum and loved it so much we got the annual membership. It was pretty inexpensive and is a great place to take Syd on cold or rainy days. This pic is the inside of a hallowed out plane where Syd got to sit in the cockpit and push all the buttons. Pretty cool.

This child loves to dress up. From princess outfits to hats of any kind she just loves putting on things and checking herself out. The following pictures are just some of her many looks, all picked out by her of course....

Syd got this idea after a book we got from the library "The Yellow Tutu" where the girl wears her tutu on her head to school. It was also Syd's idea to put her sunglasses on her belly which I thought was hilarious.

This is one of my all time fav pics!

This was my birthday cake which Seth got for me, but it was actually a huge cupcake. It's from Crumbs Cupcakes on Larchmont and was absolutely DELISH!!!

We had our old nanny KatKat babysit both Syd and Louis at Farrah and Eric's house and offered her a $20 bonus if she could get both kids to sleep. Louis had his room and we set up one of the guest bedrooms for Sydney and came home to this, both of them sleeping in the other guest bedroom. Apparently, Katkat had them both in there to read bed time stories and when she looked down they were both out. We snuck in and took several pics before we got them up. They were so sweet snoozing together.

Christmas 2011. This was at our neighbors house. We were dropping off cookies and Syd invited herself in to see their great tree. They had this real candy cane that was as tall as her, which made for a great photo op of course!

Our house

Syd running to get her first present!

A Dora video!! Thanks Jim and Susie!!

Yummy cupcake kit from Aunt Tonja with a cute owl plate to go with!

Syd trying on her new princess dress!

Big girl ready for preschool with her new princess backpack.

The very best present in the whole world!

Christmas night, heading to Farrah and Eric's house for dinner.

Syd and Auntie Farrah

Mama and Syd are both tired after a long fun packed day!

Louis with his new flashlight headband.

On Dec 18th Syd and I went to Fillmore, CA to experience the Annual Santa Train with Farrah and Louis . It's the real deal as you can see in the above pic and the train has several different style cars to choose from for the ride. It's about 40 min and takes you to the middle of nowhere, where there is a huge sprawling Christmas tree farm that you can walk around for about an hour before the train heads back. During the ride, Santa makes an appearance as he walks thru each car giving the kids candy. It was pretty awesome and something I definitely recommend if you are in the greater Los Angeles area during the holidays!

Here he comes!!

Best pic we could get. Syd and Louis weren't real sure about this Santa guy...

I just love this sweet face!!

So we get off the train at the tree farm and the first thing we see is not the pony ride, but a camel ride! What the heck?? Why there was a camel in the middle of a Christmas tree farm I will never know, but the pony ride made a little more sense so Syd got to do one of her favorite things and ride one!

There is a neighborhood in Woodland Hills, CA (on the west side of the valley) that goes to town at Christmas with crazy lights and animated displays at almost every house for several streets and blocks. We had heard of "Candy Cane Lane" before but had never gone to check it out. We knew Syd was old enough to get into it so about a week before Christmas we went and it was pretty amazing!

Syd pointing at the lights as we pulled onto the first street...

This was one of the more elaborate displays, that a picture just doesn't do justice for. This is the front of someone's house and this display was full of animated parts in sync to Christmas music. It was at least 2 stories tall and completely blocked the house behind. It felt like something out of Disney and was pretty impressive in real life.

Seth's favorite thing at "Candy Cane Lane" was this old school car completely covered in lights of all shapes and sizes. There was a moving train set that went around the roof of the car as well. It seemed to be running off the car battery which was crazy. We wished the people who owned this were outside so we could talk to them about it but instead we just trespassed on their property and took some cool pics.

We had to stop and check out this Santa just hanging out in front a house.

This picture is classic! Syd's expression says it all.

Even in the family shot, Syd has the same expression. If she were crying I would have picked her up, but instead she was just frozen trying to decide what to do. No harm done, I think?!

Thanksgiving 2011. We hosted a group of friends at our house who weren't able to spend it with their families. All in all there were 12 of us, so we had to set up 2 tables which barely fit in our dining room. We managed to make it work and were so happy to be able to celebrate with close friends at our home!

Dueling turkeys...our friend Kevin cooked up a smoked turkey wrapped in bacon....

while Seth opted for grilling his bird on the BBQ. Both turned out delicious so we called it a tie and gobbled them both up!

Sydney's birthday. Our nanny KatKat stopped by with flowers and balloons which was so sweet!

We had Syd's birthday party the Sunday before her birthday and had about 25 friends and family over to celebrate. We decided to do an "Olivia" themed party since this is Syd's favorite TV show and basically the only one she watches. If you don't know who Olivia is, she is a little 6 and half year old pig girl who is based off a best selling children's book series, which is now a cartoon show on Nick Jr. I ordered some Olivia decorations from Etsy and we put everything out when Syd was napping so when she woke up it would be a big surprise. We got her a tutu from Etsy as well in red, which is Olivia's favorite color and an Olivia birthday shirt. Needless to say she was super excited to put on her outfit and see all the decorations waiting for her!

My brother and his fiance Tati moved from Miami to LA last summer so my brother could attend Cal Arts college. It's been so great to have them around! This was a sweet moment at the party with Syd and uncle Nick.