Pirate's Booty

Lyla loves, loves, loves Pirate's Booty. You know, that puffed air, cheese-flavored snack with zero nutritional value? Yeah, that stuff. Lyla will eat it by the boatload.


She asks for it by name (boo-ee) and recognizes the bag. She says "arrrggghhh" when she sees it because there is a pirate on the cover. And she even does a little dance when she is eating it -- the Lyla Booty Shake.


On this particular night, she was particularly enthusiastic and managed to get herself (and half of her outfit) covered in faux-cheese dust. That's my girl!

Birthday Cake!

Red velvet with cream cheese frosting...yum.

Lyla vs. ConEd

Everyone who knows me knows that I am terrible at turning off lights. I create a trail of light as I travel from room to room, not turning off the light behind me. Good thing I have Lyla. She has a newfound fascination with turning off the lights. She has turned them off while we are cooking, reading, showering or getting dressed. I'm hoping she helps us make a dent in our Con Ed bill.

Baltimore Aquarium

We finished off our trip to Maryland with a visit to the Baltimore aquarium with Bammie, Pa, Julia and Kelly (who stayed over the night before and entertained Lyla while Mark and I were at the Inc. dinner).


Mark was so excited to show Lyla the sharks.


Lyla wasn't so sure at first. It was another one of those days where her death grip took hold.


A little Nemo...


...to match my little Nemo


This grumpy fish swam right over to me and looked like he was yelling at me.

Beautiful fish

Watching the fish whiz by with her big cousins


At just about this point of the day, Lyla decided to be a grump...


...just in time for the dolphin show.


Ms. Cranky Pants insisted on sitting alone.


The dolphins were amazing.

Even Lyla appreciated the tricks.


We checked out the creepy yet cool jellyfish exhibit.


Bammie managed to get a few giggles out of her at the end of a long day.


Thanks for a great visit Bammie and Pa (I don't know what's with the weird face she is making with her mouth)


I feel like I end every post with Lyla passing out...but she was literally asleep by the time we got out of the parking garage. A nice 3 hour nap for a 4 hour car ride...thank you Lyla.

Maryland Weekend

So last we left off, we were in Maryland visiting with Mark's family for the weekend. Lyla was a big help in packing for the weekend.


We used Mark's work event as an excuse to spend the weekend catching up, laughing, eating and, well, eating some more.  It was absolutely beautiful out on Saturday and we took a walk through the neighborhood.  First stop: a visit with the Spectors!  We found them hard at work on their garden and Sheila gave Lyla a tour of all the flowers.




Lyla brought her flowers to Pa. (Remember her thing with elephants? It hasn't passed yet, as you can see)


My pretty girl.




And I think she knows it.


After visiting with Sheila and Bob we headed back toward the lake to see the quack quacks.


She found more flowers by the lake and learned how to smell them. Now she goes around sniffing everything...


She got to run around and play catch with Aunt Nikki.


Not a bad way to spend the day.

Happy Birthday Daddy!!

Happy Birthday Mark. We love you.

Inc. 500

Last weekend we went to Maryland for the Inc. 500 dinner. SecondMarket was included as one of the 500 fastest-growing private companies. It was a perfect excuse to spend the weekend with Mark's family (more on our visit later).  While we were at the dinner, Lyla had about 8 babysitters to entertain.  Everyone took such good care of her and sent me text message updates all night!

So while we were doing this:


Lyla was doing this (you have to click on the video):


I think she had a lot more fun than us :)

First Braid!

I was pretty excited about her first ponytail, but her first braid is way more exciting. I'm still in shock that she actually sat still long enough for Dahlia to braid her hair.  It looks so red here!

A Visit WIth the Ellies

Lyla has recently become infatuated with elephants (we call them "ellies" in our house). It started innocently enough with an elephant flash card, but snowballed quickly after she found a picture of elephant under the letter "E" in her favorite alphabet book AND watched a Backyardigans episode where Tyrone and Pablo have to deliver an elephant to a wildlife preserve. After that, I started to hear "ellie, peeese" pretty often and she started to dump four boxes of flash cards on the floor just to find the elephant card. Being the supportive mom that I am :), I bought her a little stuffed elephant, which she loved. I then repurchased said elephant when she dropped it somewhere in Whole Foods the very next day and proceeded to have a total meltdown. You get the point I'm trying to make -- Lyla is into elephants right now.

So last Sunday we took Lyla to visit the elephants at the Museum of Natural History. It really is an amazing museum. One of the many things that is so great about having Lyla around is that I see things in a totally new way. I try to keep her perspective in mind when planning our outings and from Lyla's perspective, boy is that museum awesome. I also know that I am working with a limited attention span and energy level, so we just hit the highlights and didn't try to cover every square inch of that place. With that philosophy in mind, where to start? With the dinosaurs, of course!

I don't think Lyla had ever seen a dinosaur in her books or cards, but she was pretty excited to see the huge dinosaurs at the museum. Don't get me wrong, she kept a white knuckle grip on Mark the whole time.




She called them 'saurs.

Mom, I'm not sure about this.


After the dinosaurs, we moved on to African Mammals... elephants.


She was thrilled. She may have even loosened up the death grip to get a closer look.




Next up: the giant whale.


While the elephants were exciting because she just loves ellies, the marine life exhibit was even more fun because we just let her run free through the entire room -- back and forth and up and down.






Reading up on Cities in the Sea :)


Finally, one of our favorites -- the squid and the whale.


Lyla promptly passed out when we left the museum. Mark and I treated ourselves to burgers and shakes from the new Shake Shack on the UWS. Not a bad day to spend a Sunday.