Have you heard of Smash Books? They are a type of mini scrapbook that you put random memories in. You don’t really worry about how everything is flat. Hence the name smash book. Anyways, I thought I would do a little something like that for 2013. I am using a composition notebook. I seem to have a bunch of them because you can always find them on sale somewhere.  I haven’t put too much into it yet, but I am writing a little something every day so far. I hope to have it looking like an actual smash book in the next month.

I guess you could call it more of a daily journal right now. It is just random things that happened throughout the day or things that I am looking forward to later in the week or month.

As we are in the last several hours of 2012 I wanted to take a minute and look back on the year.

. Obviously, the best thing that happened this year was I married my best friend.

I can’t imagine my life without him and I thank God every day for him. He really is my best friend.

We love going to baseball games and this year was bittersweet in Braves Country with it being Chipper’s last season. We would have liked it to go another way in October, but it didn’t.

The Great Chipper Jones

I can’t remember when this game was, but Kenny Loggins sang the National Anthem before the game.

In October we went to Illinois for my cousin’s wedding.  She was such a beautiful bride. I have watched her grow up from a little girl to the young woman that she is today and I am so proud of her.

This one is a little blurry.

We also went on a little tour of my hometown while we were visiting Illinois. We went by the new high school.

Christmas is usually a very laid back experience in our house. No one really takes pictures during the opening of gifts so I don’t have any pictures to share. I;m sure that will change when we have little ones of our own though.

We are all not early risers so Christmas morning for us is usually around 11 AM or noon. Before my husband and I went out to gather around the Christmas tree we opened our stockings in our room. His family doesn’t do stockings, but mine did when I was growing up and I wanted to continue it for us. We opened our stockings and I found my rosie posie necklace from the Etsy shop The Polka Dot Posie along with a very cute pair of earrings that Jen sent along as a nice little surprise. I also got my annual Wizard of Oz ornament. This was something that my parents started when I first began collecting Oz stuff and I love that my husband has continued this little tradition.  We always put one of those candy cane shapes filled with candy in our stockings so a few days before Christmas we always go pick out our stocking candy. I got red and green Sprees and Nathan got Starbursts. Anyways, in his stocking I put a DVD that he had been wanting, the Hatfields and McCoys, that was on History channel earlier this year. I also gave him a box of Slim Jims. He loves those.

My rosie posie necklace

One of my favorite gifts was from my sister in law and her family. I posted it already on my Wedding Shadowbox post. It is so beautiful and I love that she took the time to make it for us. Another one of my favorite gifts is from my mom. She gave me a recipe binder with little scrapbook type pages for the dividers and recipe cards. She filled out some of them with some of my favorite recipes that she made when I was younger. I am going to send the other cards to family and friends to get some of their favorite recipes handwritten.

Nathan got me the complete series of Dawson’s Creek. It was one of my favorite shows and I can’t wait to watch it. He also got me the last two season of One Tree Hill. I haven’t seen season 9 yet so if you are an OTH fan DON’T TELL ME HOW IT ENDS!! My favorite gift from him was the Coach wristlet. He got it for me because I have a Coach purse, but there are times that I don’t really like carrying an actual purse around. Like when we go somewhere that I really won’t need it. (When we were at Jekyll Island in July, I put my purse in the hotel room closet and didn’t go anywhere with it. We had the do not disturb sign on the door the whole weekend. You know? wedding weekend!)  I have wanted a full size bottle of Paris Hilton’s Heiress perfume, but he has not been able to find one, so he got me Jennifer Anniston perfume instead. It smells almost exactly like Heiress. I love it so much.

I got Nathan the Ken Burns Civil War documentary. He loves the civil war and has actually been wanting it for a very long time. He could only find it for $100, but I found it on sale. He loved it and can’t wait to watch it. I think my favorite gift that I got him was the Daisy Red Ryder BB gun. I was so excited to give it to him because he loves the movie A Christmas Story and tries to watch all 24 hours of it every Christmas. (Funny little trivia. A Christmas Story came out on November 18, 1983. The day after my husband was born.)  It is one of his favorite movies. I got him some paper targets to go with it. He opened them and looked at me like I had two heads. He didn’t understand why I gave them to him. I told him to open his big gift then. He understood then. He loved it.

We had a dinner of ham, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and other things like that. It was very good. I don’t usually  eat ham unless it is very thinly sliced, but the ham we had was a caramel apple glazed ham and it was very very good.
I hope you had a great Christmas with your families. It truly is a time to spend with those you love. Have a safe New Year’s and please do not drink and drive.

For 2013:

 I want to be more crafty. I really don’t craft that much and with the craft a month project I think I can accomplish this one.

Read more. I tried to do 45 books in 2012, but that ended up being a bust. I did not come anywhere near 45 books. I think for next year I am going to scale it back to 20.

Yoga. I used to do yoga every day or every other day, but then I fell out of it. I am going to try some kind of workout every day.

C25K I have always wanted to run a 5K. The C25K program helps with that. I am going to start this when the weather gets warmer and that will be my workout for the days that I run. I am going to go left out of our driveway instead of right though because there aren’t as many hills to the left.

A daily Bible devotion. I was doing a daily devotion with She Reads Truth, but things got busy and I didn’t make time for it. I need to find the time to spend with God every day. Even if it is just a quick prayer or reading a verse. God doesn’t care how you spend time with Him; just that you spend time with Him.

My final craft project for 2012 has been finished. I have had this shadowbox from Archiver’s for at least two years and I knew I wanted to do something beachy with it. I had some ocean paper that I used as the background and put four pictures from our wedding on it. I put silver letter stickers to spell out our name and wedding date on the empty spaces. Then I used flowers from the leis that we were wearing in the pictures. It turned out so cute. I can’t wait to put it on our wall.