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Consider this our end-of-year letter, like the ones you find in your mailbox with holiday cards. A look at the good and not-so-good of 2024 and what we’re looking forward to in 2025.
One of my favorite things about the end of every year is reading other people’s year in review and update letters that make it to our mailbox or that they share as a social media post. I also love looking back through my planner and my photos and videos from the year to relive memories, both big and small. So I thought it might be fun to do a little life update in the form of a year-in-review podcast episode. We have some fun things that have happened this year and some great stuff on the horizon for 2025, as well as some big challenges and hard things that we have been through as a couple and a family, and I want to share those with you.
Let’s start with the good. This year, so much good happened for our family, for marriage, and us as individuals. We started the year celebrating with Joe’s family. And we’ll end the year celebrating with mine. We took the kids on dates for one-on-one quality time. We had some great fun family adventures. And the big thing was we went on a 13-day road trip that covered 3000+ miles, 60 hours of driving time (all based on our odometer)m and allowed us to make memories and explore new places together. It definitely was a highlight.
Joe completed three semesters of his master’s degree this year. He also started a new job a couple of weeks ago, doing vendor management over landscaping and snow removal for 1500 properties. He’s still in training mode for this new job, but so far he’s loving it and is excited about the potential that he sees. Although his commute is longer now, he got a pay increase, which is always good. And he gets to work from home on Mondays and Fridays, which I’m excited about, even if it might throw off my routine. So we’re definitely heading into a new season of our marriage and we’ll talk about that more in future episodes.
In 2025, Joe will be graduating with his MBA, finishing up his last class the day before our 14th anniversary. He wants to rediscover hobbies like lifting weights/bench pressing, (Is that the same thing? I’m not sure.) mowing our lawn more often, and going camping. I think he’s most excited to be done with the schooling journey this year. He is really looking forward to that.
Some of the highlights of my year included singing in a community choir, as we prepared to present The Lamb of God just after Easter, flying to California to spend Mother’s Day weekend at Disney with one of my best friends, and taking on new responsibilities at work. I really, really love my day job. I’ve put a lot of time and energy into loving myself better, creating meaningful connections with those around me, and enjoying my own personal hobbies again. I’m heading into 2025 with some big personal and professional goals. Including some for A Prioritized Marriage, the Prioritize Your Marriage podcast, and my local date night website slash social media. So stay tuned. I’m currently looking forward to celebrating 14 years of marriage with Joe and the end of his school journey in June. I have been brainstorming lots of ideas that I’m working to set in stone and plan a really fun weekend celebration for the two of us in June.
Now the not so good. While, this year was filled with a lot of good moments, milestones, and memories, I would be painting an unrealistic picture if I didn’t also share hard times. Probably the most difficult thing about 2024 was saying goodbye to our dog Howie this last week. Howie has been a part of our family since our second wedding anniversary in 2013. And he has a huge piece of all of our hearts and many of our family and friends as well. You’ve probably heard me refer to him as our forever third wheel, because he was always right there during our at-home dates and always wanted to be in the middle of any cuddle session or hug Joe and I had going on. In 2020, Howie was diagnosed with diabetes and went almost completely blind over the course of three days, which was so hard for me to watch. In 2023, he got an eye ulcer that never fully healed and we suspected he had Cushing’s disease as well. This year he’s had minor health challenges and they had accepted that we were in his final years of life, but I thought we were going to have a little bit longer. Instead, he started to decline right before the holidays. We tried a few different things just to make sure it wasn’t something that we could fix before we made the really, really tough decision to say goodbye to him the day after Christmas. It has been really hard not having him around. We’ve all been grieving and missing him through all of our daily routines. But I know he’ll always have a huge place in our hearts and our memories and we are working on memorializing him in different aspects throughout our home.
Our house has a habit of taking on water in some form at least once a year. We found a leak in our water main in November, which wasn’t as damaging as some of our water problems have been, but still obnoxious. My health has struggled a bit over the last few years. And this year I’ve been managing pre-diabetes as well I was dealing with a pretty significant kidney stone in the spring that gave me a lot of grief until I had it removed. We also had a pretty frustrating season with strep throat in our family, starting in January all the way through the end of the school year in May. Here’s hoping that 2025 is a healthier year for our house and the humans that live in it.
If I had to note something that has been the biggest challenge for our marriage in 2024, it would be parenting. Parenting is not for the faint of heart. And I always joke that the ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting’ book leaves out so much about expecting the unexpected, and what that can look like. It can often be really hard to remember that you’re both on the same team in all different various of your life. But for us, it has been that for our parenting this year. And remembering that we have the same goals for our children and that it’s us working towards them together and we’re not working against each other. We’re heading into 2025 with a plan, additional resources, and together in our resolve for both of our kiddos and the challenges we’ve faced this past year. I don’t want to put a timeline on it, but I’m hopeful that by February we’ll be settled into these new things, the dust will have calmed and we’ll be on a good path as parenting partners.
Looking forward to 2025, a little bit more than I’ve already shared, Joe and I have been discussing this coming year in a positive light. Because 2024 really has been challenging even though it’s had a lot of good. We have goals for our finances, our house, our family adventures, and personal development. This coming month podcast episodes, so the month of January, will focus on setting goals as a couple and supporting each other in your individual goals. While the new year isn’t the only time to set goals, it is a time when many people set goals and discussion is focused on starting anew, so I’m going to follow along that line with the episodes here. And I’ll be sharing more of the goals that we have set as a couple and as individuals alongside that.
Happy New Year! I hope you enjoy the rest of your holiday season this week. Thank you again for being part of the Prioritized <arriage community. I hope you’ve enjoyed this year in review and I would love to hear some good and some bad that’s happened for you this year. So pop over to Instagram and join the conversation today.