Keep the Change You Filthy Animal

I am SO excited for it to be 2013.  2012 was definitely not what I expected, but looking back it was SUCH a blessed year.  I am SO grateful for the wonderful people in my life and these wonderful memories and experience I am able to have and cherish.   These were some of my favorite moments from 2012:

-January- started this blog!-February- started nannying, celebrated my little sister's 21st birthday, made some awesome new friends, and smashed the living daylights out of a heart pinata.  -March- Went to the Baltimore Aquarium with one of my best friends and sister, and experienced Cheesecake Factory cheesecake for the first time.  -April- Went to the re-release of Titanic and totally fangirled, went to an All-American Rejects concert, and day-tripped down to DC with 3 of my best friends. -May- Chopped off 5-6 inches of my hair and dyed it brown, went to the Mayfair and saw Boys Like Girls.  -June- Went on my first vacation in over 5 years down to the Baltimore area!  -July- My Grammy (my grandma) turned 90!  -August- Won tickets to the Mixtape fest and saw 98 Degrees, Backstreet Boys, New Kids on the Block, LL Cool J, and MANY more awesome old groups! Also house-sat and enjoyed hot-tubbing. And I was hired to photograph my first wedding! -September- Went to see Switchfoot just miles from my house! -October- Went to Atlantic City to celebrate 2 of my best friends birthdays with them and my sister! Also saw There For Tomorrow in concert and had an epic time!  -November- My baby niecey was born! Little Maggie! And I flipping saw Joseph Gordon-Levitt LIVE and in person and almost touched his butt! -December- Turned 25! Christmas celebrations, spent time with my family, sewed some awesome ornaments and had a WONDERFUL holiday.

How To Make A Heart To Break (Heart of Stone Part 2)

A few weeks ago, I mentioned making a heart piñata for my sister's birthday to smash to pieces. It was SO fun and cheap and easy to do, so I thought I'd share how:

Here's what you need:

*A heart-shaped ballon.  I went to dollar tree to get it. Heck yes.

* Make sure you have flour, water, and a little elmer's glue.

* Newspaper

*Scissors

*Medium-sized container to mix ingredients, and another container to set it on.

( please note NCIS in the background :))

1.Cut newspaper into strips.

2.Mix about 2 cups water and enough flour to make into an Elmer's glue-like paste.

(Add just about 2 TBS of elmer's glue for stickiness.)

3.Dip strips into paste

4.  Run fingers down strip to get off excess.

5.Place on top of balloon and use fingers to smooth out.

6.Cover entire balloon with moistened strips.

7.Set on top of emtpy container to dry so it won't stick to any surfaces.

Also, after it dried for a few hours, I hung it up to dry completely, then I spray painted it outside. Then, you stick a pin in the bottom and pop the ballon once its dry and pull it out the bottom. This leaves room to stuff candy, paper, goodies, etc. Then you can just tape the bottom shut.

1.Hang it up

2.Smash it up

3. Enjoy the stress relief.

Heart of Stone

This past Thursday my little sister Hannah turned 21....ah! Wow, I am still in shock, where does the time go?!  The poor thing has had like 4 awful birthdays in a row, including getting deathly sick ON her birthday every year! So this year, we were determined to make it AWESOME! And awesome it was.

Has anyone seen the movie Valentine's Day? Not the scary one that has some serial killer in it (I saw that on TV a while ago, and remembered it when I looked up this picture...haha). But this one:

WAY cute movie, with like 50 gazillion stars in it. But in the movie Jessica Biel throws an anti-valentine's party anf Jennifer Garner smashes a heart-shaped piñata to pieces after getting her heart broken.

Hannah always wanted to do this, and after having two really crappy boyfriends this past year, we figured this was the perfect time!

And heck, I knew I could enjoy it too after my, well, we'll call it my "less than awesome relationship."

So, I made her a heart piñata

(very fun and easy, more details on that later)

and we had a group of our girlfriends get together and after much eating and laughing and sucking at bowling, we took pieces of paper and wrote down the names of boys who had done us wrong, then made letters to them getting out our frustrations and put them 

along with some insulting caricatures of the said boys and candy in the piñata,

 and proceeded to smash the little bugger to pieces

 and then danced on the ashes.

It was flipping UH-MAZING!! I totally recommend this, even if you havent had your heart broken...this is like stinking therapy yo! We even taped it up and did it all over again. Girl time, is the best time.

And you want to know what was hilariously ironic?? My ex, the reason I wanted to obliterate this heart, helped me shop for the spray paint to paint the piñata with... and it gets better... the color he picked out? Stone. That's right, the color was called "stone."  How fitting, considering I always said he has a heart of stone. PAHAHAHA!