Mid-Year Update

Well with only ten days left in June 2015. Where am I on my goal list?  Let see.......... I've only accomplished 3 things out of 10. WOW!!!! ONLY 30%!!! Seriously what have I've been doing????

The 3 things I've accomplished:

1. Become a Certified Fraud Examiner - Done May 2015
2. Visit two new cities/country - Done April 2015
3. Make contribution to Roth IRA - Done March 2015

Goals left for 2015: 

1. Take & Pass FAR section of the CPA Exam - May July 2015 - My FAR Section is scheduled for July 26, 2015!! Hopefully, I can cross this one off soon.
2. Take & Pass AUD section of the CPA Exam - August 2015
3. Take & Pass REG section of the CPA Exam - November 2015
4. Take & Pass BEC section of the CPA Exam - January 2016
5. Read two books
6. Save at least 10% of annual income
7. Family trip to Disney World for Christmas 2015 (May get postponed)

Jan to May 2015 Recap:

January: Recouping from the holidays and work
February: Family ski/snowboarding trip to Denver
March: Little Monster's first international trip to Narnia (Vancouver, Canada)
April: Little Monster's first oversea trip to Singapore & Japan
May: Work and started studying for CPA Exam

I better hop onto it and start getting these goals knocked out. I still have half of 2015 to finish these goals up.

Travel Themed Baby Shower

I was the first to called dibs on throwing the baby shower the moment I found out my good friend was expecting. I was so excited, I pretty much started planning in my head right away. Since, we're travel buddies and my friend travels a lot, I knew a travel theme was perfect for the baby shower. Also, my friend and I have this obsession with mint green, so the colors I choose were gray, mint green and yellow.

Little Monster's First Birthday

My little monster is turning one and I decided to throw a Minnie Mouse Tsum Tsum party. Disney Tsum Tsum are my latest obsession, they are these little plush dolls that you can stack. Let's get stacking!

I've been planning this birthday since the day she was born. A few weeks prior to the party, I started making all the party decorations. As for the cake, we had a friend make a Minnie Mouse Tsum Tsum cake with a semi-smaller smash tsum tsum cake for the little monster.

Here's how the party came out:

 

My niece helped me make a welcome sign. Since it was raining all day we put the sign by the front door.

DIY Projects: 1st Birthday Decorations

The days are numbered until my little monster is turns one. Since I had a Mickey Mouse cake for my first birthday, I thought I would do a Minnie Mouse themed first birthday for my little one.

To get ideas I went online to view other Minnie Mouse themed birthday parties. I got so many creative ideas, but felt like I'm still missing something. Then it clicked.... Minnie Mouse tsum tsum themed party. For those who don't know what tsum tsums are, they are little plush stackable dolls by Disney. It's also a video game Disney created.

I wasn't able to find any tsum tsum inspired party decorations, so I had to create some myself. Here are some of the things I created for my little monster's first birthday party. 

Material List:
- Paper Mache Letters/Numbers
- Black and Red Paint
- Foam Paint Brush
- Ruler or a Straight Edge
- Black, Pink, Red, Red w/ Polka Dot, Beige and White Paper
- Scissor, Hole Puncher and Glue
- Black Ribbon
- Red and White Tulle

Blogging Take 2 - "I'm Backs!"

Well... this was a fail project for me. The whole goal was to start a blog and write about my challenges before I turned 30. Little did I know that blogging will take A LOT of work. Soooooo let me try to start again... (wish me luck)

Since my last post, the two main things that happened were becoming a mother to a beautiful and rambunctious little monster (my daughter) and finishing my missing credits to qualify for the CPA Exam in Texas.

Having a child is a real game changer and a big adjustment in our lives. Fortunately, we still travel quite a bit and our little monster travels quite well. I think my next post will be about our must haves during our travels.

Until next time...

FAIL: Homemade Hostess Cupcakes

This is my first food post and it's going to be about how I failed at making cupcakes. Great.....I hope ya'll (like my Texas accent?) don't get the impression that I can't cook because I can. Like I said before my niece and nephew is staying with me for a week in the summer, so I thought it would be fun to make cupcakes with/for them. They wanted chocolate cupcakes, so I pulled up the Hostess Cupcake recipe (w/ pictures) to show them and they screamed "YES, THAT ONE!" This is the recipe I kind of followed to make these Hostess Cupcakes - Brown Eyed Baker. In the end, the cupcakes still tasted very good, so all was not lost.

All the recipes for the Hostess Cupcakes used chocolate cake made from scratch and I wasn't about to do that, so I replaced with a box of chocolate cake mix. First, I made the cupcake from the directions on the box (easy peasy) and preheated the oven.

First DIY Project: Crayola Melting Art

So these Crayola melting art can be found all over Pinterest and my niece has been dying to do one of these projects. Since she will be staying with me for about a week over the summer, I decided to do this with her. I haven't done an arts and craft project in years, so I didn't have any material to even began. Our first step was to make a trip to Hobby Lobby and ended up spending hours there going through each aisle (especially the 80-90% section - more on that later). Below is a list of what we ultimately got for this project:

Material List (from Hobby Lobby)
- High Temp Hot Glue Gun (I didn't own one) $2.99
- 50-pack of Glue Sticks $4.99
- 2-pack of Canvas $7.99
- A Box of 94 Crayola Crayons $8.99

When we got home, I immediately made my niece sort out all the crayons and had her begin by picking out all the colors she liked. Meanwhile, I looked for tutorials online and decided to use this blog's tutorial for this project - 52 Kitchen Adventures.