Year End Recap 2025

The year 2025 has come to an end and I wanted to share a recap of our family this past year. It was full of adventures, surgeries, new life, death, and lots of in between emotions. Life always brings a mix of bitter to the sweet and 2025 brought both. We lost 2 dear senior family members, my dad and Mark’s mom, so that’s the end of their generation in our lives. We miss them all so much and holidays are not quite the same, but we must go on and keep living life. God has seen us through a lot of things and no doubt, He will continue to do so. Come along with me as I look back at the year and see what all we did. I usually share all the projects we do around here, but those have mostly come to an end too as we have renovated and upgraded almost every single inch of our house. I’ve shared all those projects on here in the past. Now, we are enjoying our home sweet home so  much!

In January, we started out with a Celebrity cruise to kick off the year with several couples from our church. We enjoyed it a lot and I’d highly recommend doing one just to get out of the cold of winter in the dreariest (to me!) month of the year. Mark got a bug while we were on the ship, so didn’t have as much fun, but he got over it in a couple of days and was feeling better by the end of the cruise. In fact, we are going on another cruise this week to the Caribbean, so I’ll be sharing that with you when we return. This one is a Princess cruise, our first time on that line.

I really enjoyed the Celebrity experience. They were top notch in everything so I can’t wait to do another one with them.

Not long after we got back, Dad took a turn for the worse in his health and passed away within a few days after I was able to see him. They were on lockdown from various viruses when I came back from the cruise and I wasn’t able to see him for a week, but he had deteriorated a lot in that time. I’m thankful he didn’t linger and suffer long and we miss him and mom a lot. Mom has been gone 2 years now and it has gone so fast.

We had a nice celebration of life for daddy and my sister and family were all here. The girls are growing up so fast! If you’re new here, these are my niece and great nieces.

Mark and I got out and about traveling abroad and here in Georgia. This was a day trip to LaGrange, GA to see the Hills and Dales mansion and we did that in March.

In April, we went with Go Ahead tours again to Italy and this time went to Florence, Tuscany, Cinque Terra, and Lake Como. Just a reminder that we are doing another Go Ahead tour in September of this year to England, Ireland and Scotland and the door is open for anyone to join us on this group trip. We would love to have you! You can see that post for all the details!

We enjoyed these trips so much and the memories are going to be lifelong. I took so many beautiful pictures!

I’d go back to Italy in a heartbeat, but we want to see some other places too, so we’re going to have to rotate. My plan is to travel as much as we can the next 10 years.

There’s so much to see and do in this beautiful world of ours!

In May, Mark planted our little tomato and herb garden and it did so well that we had tomatoes coming in til frost. We are so excited to do it again this year!

I planted my usual planters out by the pool and they were beautiful all year long.

Also in May, my family came home and we had a military service at Georgia National Cemetery, honoring Dad’s military service and placing them both together in the vaults that are onsite.

It’s a beautiful cemetery.

In June, I had my first anterior hip replacement and did well with it. I was up and walking on my cane in no time and healed up pretty fast.

On July 4th, we lost Nanny Joan, Mark’s mom. It was a hard year for loss and last year was hard as well, losing Mark’s sister, Kim. We all go through loss as a family, but it’s never easy.

Later in August, the whole family got together for a celebration of life service for Nanny on their property that they lived on for 40 years. It was a very sweet time for all of them. Mark comes from a very big family as you can see. This is his 4 girls and their families and his 2 sister’s families all combined. There’s a slew of them!

Also in July, I filmed an ad for cataracts. I never mentioned it but I was about 3 weeks out of my hip surgery, they came to my house and got everything set up with cameras and lighting and we filmed all day. I’ll share the video they did and this video is going to be shown in eye doctor’s offices around the country. Yes, I got paid for it too, so it was a fun thing to do! They found me because I blogged about my cataract surgery in 2023 and liked what I said. That’s a link to the finished ad. They were going to change out one picture in there and I never heard back, so I’ll share it as is. It turned out really nice, I think.

In August, I shared our new Wesley Hall sofa and the ottoman I had recovered. That’s about the extent of projects last year, but that was fine by me.

In late August, I headed to Cashiers, NC for the designer showhouse with a good friend of mine and we made a couple days of it, enjoying the mountains.

In late August, we welcomed baby Luke to the family. He belongs to McKenzie (Mark’s youngest) and Patrick and big brother, Logan. He’s a sweet baby and he makes #10 grandbaby. I shared their 2019 wedding here 6 years ago and now they have 2 boys! Another fun fact:  they were both born December 31st!

In September, we went back to St. George Island for a wonderful week of sunshine and great seafood.

In early October, I shared a refresh in our master bedroom, when I changed out the coverlet to jewel tones and a more fall/winter feel.

In October, we had a family wedding in Wilmington, NC on a blustery rainy day, but it was very nice in spite of the weather.

Later in October brought my 2nd hip surgery and I spent the next couple of months recovering from that, while trying to get ready for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

In November, we celebrated Thanksgiving and I got to see my family when they came up for a couple of days. There aren’t as many of us now, but it was still sweet.

We had several Christmas outings this year and I enjoyed all of them, including the Tate House here in North Georgia.

It was a blessed time of celebrations of the Christmas season.

On Christmas day, Mark’s girls and family have gone out for Chinese for many years and they love this tradition, so even though we are growing, we all met up again, there were 17 of us and with 8 kids, quite lively. We took this quick snap before we all left for home.

Of course, I decorated our house even though I was slower at it this year. It’s all still up and will be staying up until I get back from the cruise. I’m doing very well after my surgery 2 months ago and starting to feel more back to normal. Surgeries are no joke and I’m glad to have them both behind me now. I’ll be exercising and working on getting my stamina back and hopefully next year I can keep up with Mark’s strides. He walks way faster than I do! As you can see, we had quite a busy year with everything going on. These are just the highlights. You don’t even realize these things until you look back at a whole year and see what all occurred over 12 months. There was a lot of living in those months! And a lot of recovering for me over the summer with 2 surgeries. I’m so very happy for God’s blessings on us once again as a family. He has never let us down, through the ups and downs of life! Thank you all for reading along and hanging out with me for all these years. I’ll be doing a blog recap next weekend of my 19 years of blogging. So hard to believe it’s been that long!

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