I hope you’ve all had wonderful holidays, friends! We are laying low after a stretch of extended family visits, and it has been sweet. I’m down to the wire to squeeze in the two final blog posts of 2022 – this one and tomorrow’s year-in-review – but I wouldn’t miss them. They help me count the fruit from another precious year, and that’s an opportunity I’ll fight for even in the midst of these full, chaotic, slow post-holiday days. I hope they can serve as an opportunity for a little reflection on your own 2022, if you haven’t had a chance for it yet! In the comments, please share a few of your best memories, finds, and favorites from 2022, if you’d like. As always, I can’t wait to hear!
Best adventure, travel, or trip: Our tenth-anniversary trip Mayakoba in Mexico is an obvious frontrunner here, but our Fourth of July week in Michigan was near perfect. We were so happy to be back after a five-year hiatus and to be with so much dear family. Just looking at the photos makes me grin. We also took an unexpected day trip to the North Carolina coast for June’s January birthday since it happened to be 70 degrees, and I feel like it’s a memory we’ll be talking about for years.
Best book: I read 21 books in 2022, a bit lower than my usual, and that included a higher percentage that I was ambivalent about and one I didn’t finish (rare for me!). Still, there were gems: Hunt, Gather, Parent and The Common Rule for nonfiction, and The Evening and the Morning for fiction (with an honorable mention for my favorite read-aloud with June, The Penderwicks!).
Best TV show: The second season of OMITB was as good as the first. (Steve Martin, I will never quit you.) We also thoroughly enjoyed The Mole, a delightful, clever reboot of the early-2000s cult classic. Severanceand Reacher get honorable mentions.
Best movie: After a movie-theater drought, John and I saw Top Gun: Maverick on opening night and it did not disappoint.
Best album, song, or artist: “King of Kings” and “All Glory Be to Christ” struck a chord with me this year in the way the best worship songs do. The Arcade Fire is inextricably twined into the narrative of John’s and my relationship (Funeral was the exclusive soundtrack of our first months of dating); their newest album We was on repeat after its May debut. And “Dance With Me Tonight” is just a fun bop that was my pick-me-up song this year.
Best new podcast listen, newsletter subscribe, or blog follow: I subscribed to Laura Wifler’s newsletter earlier this year, and it’s been a once-a-month delight ever since. Laura is the co-host of the Risen Motherhood podcast, and her newsletter is meaty and packed with things she’s learning about life and faith, book recommendations, and parenting insights. I also rediscovered Erin Loechner’s blog, Design for Mankind, and though she only posts a few times a year, it is worth it to me to subscribe to make sure they land in my inbox. Her writing is elegant, poignant, searing. I love it.
Best kiddo milestone: Annie walking and “talking” has been a delight. She loves to move purposefully around the house, her hands clasped behind her back, making earnest burbles and gestures to each of us, and it does not fail to crack me up.
Best faith grower: This one is probably obvious, but joining our church. It has stretched and grown and deepened our faith even as it has renewed our faith in the local institution of the church.
Best beauty purchase: I mix one drop of these tanning drops into my moisturizer every other night and love how they even out my skin (which can sometimes run a tad too rosy) without makeup.
Best friend memory: I’ll always remember our backyard “spring party” as a sweet turning point in our friendship with two dear preschool-friend families. There’s just something about inviting people into your space that deepens relationship.
Best new tradition: This is a nascent tradition, but I can already tell it has legs: Saturday board game nights. Now that family movie night is well established on Friday nights, we thought it might be time to introduce a second themed family evening. And you know I’ve been waiting for this one! Ocean BINGO has been our most successful game so far when we include our non-reader – the illustrations are beautiful, and it really is fun for everyone to play.
Best habit you created: This isn’t necessarily a new habit, but perhaps a renewed one. I had fallen out of the habit of biking with June to school, but with the start of her first-grade year, we picked it back up and it has been the sweetest bookend to our days. We biked well into November, and look forward to getting back at it once the temps rise a bit!
Favorite blog post written: This post with tips for the fourth trimester is dear to me, because it contains hard-earned wisdom I’ve been grateful to pass on to many friends offline, and am now glad to have it recorded here, too – and while it was fresh. Any time I’m able to capture my love and gratitude for John is a privilege. And this four-part series on working part-time as a mom helped me process a big transition in my life. I’m sure it’s a series I’ll be returning to for years to come.
Best life or mom hack: For years, I’ve used the monthly calendar in my PowerSheets as my sole planner. Our family’s life together is pretty simple, and, combined with my trusty Word to-do list, it got the job done. This fall, however, I’ve started to transfer the contents of each week to CWM’s weekly notepad on Sunday, and it has been so helpful to have more space to see each day’s happenings at a glance and to jot reminders and to dos in one central place as they pop up. I just wish the notepad included full columns for Saturday and Sunday but (spoiler alert!) the next version we print should include them!
Best mama moment: There were so many favorite moments, remarkable in their ordinariness and preciousness, but our girls’ trip to Charlotte and the American Girl store is a very sweet memory. I love spending time with our kids, and love seeing who they are becoming.
Best home improvement: Another obvious winner here: our kitchen refresh, which was a decade in the making and has transformed our entire downstairs. I am beyond grateful and still somewhat in shock that it’s complete. But if I could pick one small detail that has sparked a surprising amount of joy, it would be the wall clock we added in the midst of the renovation. I can see it from anywhere in the main room, and it has smoothed out a pain point I almost didn’t notice: having to reach for my phone whenever I wanted to check the time. Adding the clock has made it so that I can go phone-free more often, which I love.
Best little luxury you’ve enjoyed:Fairlife chocolate milk. John turned us onto it after reading that Katie Ledecky drinks chocolate milk in the cool-down pool after swimming a race, and so naturally we’ve adopted it as our post-Peloton reward of choice. Yes, I’m saying we’re basically the same as Katie Ledecky.
As always, I’m ending the year so grateful for the delights, big and small, that filled our year. I’ll be sharing more in my year-in-review post coming tomorrow, but in the meantime, please do share: what are some of your “bests” from 2022? Can’t wait to hear!
Merry Christmas and happy holidays, friends! I wanted to pop in and share our Christmas card before the big day passes us by. As always, we chose a design from Minted, though this is the first year in 9 years (!) that they were not a gift! The PR gal I’ve always worked with has moved on, and I didn’t have it in me to complete the rigamarole (posting, custom codes, stories, reels!) they ask influencers to do these days :) Regardless, I never considered a card from another option – the quality is beautiful and the designs are perfect. Here’s what we chose this year!
I’ll confess that I felt a bit scattered when sending our card to print, and didn’t include the names and ages of our children, the year, a piece of scripture, or a few additional photos on the back as I usually do – yeesh. Of course, names and ages are on our accompanying newsletter, but I like to have them on the card, too, in case they get separated in posterity.
This year, we opted to use the photo we snapped on Easter in our backyard in lieu of a photo session. It was an expensive year (ahem, kitchen, I’m looking at you), and it just seemed to make sense to go with a beautiful photo we already had!
And then, of course, we tucked a copy of our 2022 newsletter into each envelope:
I am seriously considering moving to an old-school narrative newsletter on folded, white 8.5×11 printer paper next year. Thoughts?! Would you find it weird if you got one in the mail? These types of missives used to be ubiquitous in the cards my family received growing up, and I loved reading them. And I’d be following in a proud family tradition :)
Wishing everyone celebrating a wonderful, restful, joyful weekend! I’ll see you back here next week for my Best of 2022 and 2022 Year in Review posts.
To say this post – this project – is a long time coming is… a bit of an understatement.
On November 3, 2019, I ordered the Purl Soho Advent Calendar Kit. A month later, I set a 2020 goal to complete it before December. “Two goals have dovetailed beautifully with this initiative:” I wrote, “wanting to spend less time on screens, and wanting to complete our new Advent calendar! After years of admiring this DIY calendar kit, I finally bit the bullet and purchased it. With many pieces, intricate details, and the need to learn new skills, I anticipate it will be a year-long project that will keep my hands busy in the evenings and on weekends, as well as produce a beautiful heirloom for our family!”
Keep my hands busy? Check. Beautiful heirloom for our family? Check. Year-long project? Hahahahahaha.
In June 2020, I reported in on the progress I’d made: almost none. All I had done at that point was open the box early in the year and quickly close it back up, wildly intimidated. From my brief peek at the instructions, I was under the impression that the whole project involved machine sewing, when in reality (and with thanks to kind encouragement from reader Carly, who completed the same kit and clued me in!), only the pockets required a machine.
With this realization, in August 2020, things took a major upward swing! While we were visiting John’s parents in Connecticut, I completed five whole ornaments under the tutelage of my wonderful mother-in-law. Once I got the hang of it, I was quickly sewing up a storm at nap times and in the evenings, but I honestly don’t know if I would ever have gotten started if she hadn’t been at my side. Thank you, Jean!!
I completed four more ornaments in September, and three more in October, then progress fell off a cliff when first-trimester nausea and tiredness hit in November and December (looking at you, Annie).
In 2021, I set a yearly goal of “prioritizing memory keeping,” an umbrella which included finishing the Advent calendar. And then, with a newborn and an Achilles injury and houseguests for six continuous weeks and kindergarten, I did not complete a single stitch until October, when I pulled the kit back out and embroidered the pocket numbers in cheery red floss. When we returned to Connecticut for Christmas, my angel mother-in-law gathered the pocket strips and sewed them together on her machine.
Friends, this was the first time this project felt like A Thing instead of a random collection of felt items. And it felt sooooooooo good!
Thus we arrive at the present year. In 2022, I learned from the pitfalls of my 2021 goals and got a little more strategic with my creative projects. Determined to finish the various projects I had underway and not have my efforts be scattered across all of them at once, I assigned each to a quarter. Finishing the Advent calendar got assigned to Q4, so I didn’t worry about picking it back up until October.
When fall rolled around, I opened my pretty pink box back up and got to work sewing sequins around the edge of the tree. Painstaking, but satisfying! In November, I sewed the tree to the backer and sewed on the hanging pole. And that (drumroll, please), meant that on the 1st of December in the year of our Lord 2022, I hung an actual Advent calendar on our actual wall that I had made with my own two actual hands. Praise and hallelujah and bless it to the heavens!
Was I finished with this project, though? No, dear reader, I was not finished: I still had six final ornaments to sew. I was bound and determined to complete them before Christmas, though, and so all month have been chipping away at them little by little. As of this writing, I have one more to sew, and I’m confident I can complete it before December 24th :)
Here we are: $98*, two and a half years, a little sweat equity from my mother-in-law, much encouragement from John and my children, and countless hours of detailed sewing later, we have a bonafide family heirloom. It is glorious. I love it. June and Shep have delighted in pinning the ornaments on one-by-one each day this month. It has secured a spot on the top-five list of things I’d save in a fire, assuming my family and pets have made it out safely.
The other day, as she watched me add beads to a tiny snowman, June asked which child I would lend the calendar to when they were older.** And wow, what a way to bring things full circle: the reason I was inspired to undertake this project in the first place is because my family had a very similar felt Christmas tree Advent calendar growing up. It was a mainstay in our front hallway throughout every December of my childhood; nothing was better than the days when it was my turn to pin the ornament on the tree. I hoped my children might feel the same way about this one, and early signs indicate that they just might. All those hours of sewing? Worth it, worth it, worth it.
I’m not sure if my two-and-half-year saga will encourage a single reader to pick up this kit, but I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Once I got over my initial fear, the directions really were quite easy to follow – it all just takes a bit of time. In fact, I got so comfortable that I ended up free-styling about half the ornaments. The directions call for you to make two of each type of ornament (two stars, two candy canes, etc.), but I liked the idea of each ornament being distinct. Plus, I wanted to translate some of the ornaments from my family’s calendar growing up, and include a few more Christian symbols in the mix, too. Once I had the basic know-how for making the ornaments, it was easy enough to make new patterns and sew my own designs. For those curious, our one-of-a-kind calendar includes a heart, letter, present, cross, ice skate, holly, angel, drum, crown, shepherd’s crook, and snowman along with Purl’s standard shapes.
Friends, thank you for coming along on this journey! If you have any questions about this kit, I’d be happy to answer! I hope this post might encourage you to take on your own creative project, knowing that no matter how long it takes, it will likely be worth it in the end. It most definitely has been for me. xo!
*I purchased the kit for $98 (minus a 10% off coupon for signing up for the email list) in 2019. Somehow, the price has swollen to $175 in 3 years?!? It is currently 25% off on the website (if the promotion isn’t active when you’re reading this, be sure to sign up to get the email discount). They also offer the option of buying the pattern and gathering your own supplies (which they kindly list for you). I think this could be a great option, but if you go this route do NOT skimp on the felt – I’d order it from Purl, because it is extremely high-quality, vibrantly-colored, and makes or breaks the project!
**Of course, I told her that I would be so happy to make her a calendar of her own when she was older. To which she responded that I should make sure to give myself plenty of time, because this one took me a few years (LOL). We agreed I’d start on each child’s when they left for college.
By now, most of you are probably aware that our tenth-anniversary trip was rerouted at the last minute. With a hurricane bearing down on Bermuda, we booked new flights and accommodations less than 24 hours (!) before departing for Mexico (!) in a grand pivot. Though it was a stressful few days leading up to the trip, it all worked out wonderfully: for our scrambling, we were rewarded with five days of relaxing, enjoying each other’s company, reminiscing, and casting vision for our next ten years of marriage in our own mini marriage summit. It was a true gift. I’d love to tell you about it and share a few photos today!
Before we get to the fun, though, let’s do a brief recap of the stress, ha. Those may look like two happy faces on an airplane to paradise, and they were, but in the week leading up this moment things weren’t quite so happy. About a week before we were due to depart, we began watching the weather (as one does). John also began tracking the weather on various websites and apps (as he does, amateur weatherman that he is). And what did we see? A hurricane headed straight for Bermuda. No worries, we thought: surely the track will change in the next seven days. So every day we checked, and every day… it remained resolutely headed for our island. Five days out… four days out… three days out… still headed straight for Bermuda.
We began to feel more and more nervous. At some point, one of us suggested something about how maybe we should consider alternative options…? To which the other probably said something like, no way! Really? No, we probably don’t need to. Nah…….. but the track continued to not change, and the hour of our departure inched ever closer.
About 48 hours out, we agreed that continuing with our trip to Bermuda was not a viable option for us. The hurricane was scheduled to directly hit the island the day before our departure back to the U.S., and we felt we couldn’t risk getting stuck on the island for days with no power or water and our kids back home. We considered postponing the trip, but agreed we’d rather go forward with a trip of some sort since we had both taken the time off work and my parents had cleared their schedules to watch our kids.
(Side note: We had purchased travel insurance, since we were traveling in hurricane season. However, Bermuda needed to be under a hurricane watch or warning for our insurance to activate. This was challenging, since the hurricane was supposed to hit toward the end of our trip, and watches/warnings are generally only issued 24-48 hours before landfall. We had to make the decision to rebook our flight and accommodations before knowing we would receive a reimbursement for our Bermuda itinerary, which was unnerving, financially.)
With that decision made, John dove into research mode and began obsessively searching for a new destination: somewhere warm, a short and easy plane flight away, and not in a hurricane’s path. Though he considered many destinations, including domestic options, he quickly narrowed in on Mexico, and then Banyan Tree Mayakoba. I wish I could tell you all the details and what about it stuck out to him – it was not on our radar at all before this week – but he handled all of the research and most of the decision-making. I glanced at a few photos before giving it my thumbs up and hopping on the phone to book our room.
And then 24 hours later, we were there! We drove the two hours to Charlotte, then hopped on a 2.5-hour flight to Cancun. (Everything everyone says about flying sans-children being its own vacation is entirely true. Though we were still winding down from the stress and adrenaline of changing our plans and getting out the door, just sitting in the airport reading a magazine and not managing little people was incredibly relaxing!)
But of course, that was only our first taste of what was to come. After making our way through the bewildering gauntlet of taxi drivers at the airport door, we found the driver we’d booked through the resort and made the 40-minute drive to Mayakoba.
The view from the lobby in the main building. Cello is off to the left and breakfast was served to the right.
Once we stepped on property, we never stepped off until we headed back to the airport. We might have done things differently if we had had more time to plan, but we didn’t feel like we were missing anything by staying in place. Mayakoba is a beautiful and unique property. It’s a large natural preserve of mangrove forest set next to the ocean, with canal waterways crisscrossing the property. The rooms are spread out around the acreage, with some at the main building in the heart of the jungle and others near the ocean (our room was on the beach – an oceanfront veranda pool suite). Our room came with bikes to move around the expansive property and our rate included breakfast, too.
It also included fresh salsa, guacamole, and lime-y margaritas as we signed our check-in paperwork, which is a very direct route to my heart.
The margaritas may have made the cost go down easier, too. Because of course, this trip was a splurge – though one we had planned for, saved for, and felt incredibly grateful to experience. The view from our room alone was an embarrassment of riches.
The funny thing about our grand pivot was that in the end, we actually got a more luxurious vacation than we had originally planned: Bermuda is just a generally expensive locale, and we were already planning to splurge there. When we rerouted our budget to Mexico, a much less expensive location, it went further. We soaked up every minute. There are lots of things our money has to go to, but when John and I think about the money we get to spend, there are few things more worthy of celebrating than ten years of marriage to a best friend.
At top is the pool at the Sands Beach Club, close to our room. Below is the pool at the main building.
After exploring our room, we headed out to the beach. We swam in the ocean. We took a dip in our pool. We lounged by the resort pool. We rode bikes around the property. We had more chips and guacamole and margaritas.
It turned out it was totally fine that we hadn’t made any reservations or plans: we were perfectly happy to spend our days with no agenda, moving from one body of water to another.
We anchored our days with big breakfasts at the buffet in the main building and with dinner at one of the restaurants on-property. That buffet, man. We actually had the option each day of a plated breakfast at the beach restaurant near us or the buffet breakfast, and once we had the buffet we never sampled the plated breakfast, ha!
Walking to dinner the first night at the Sands Beach Club
For dinner, the concierge helped us make reservations for the first three nights when we arrived, and then we returned to our favorite on the fourth and final night. We had our choice of times and locations throughout our stay: we were lucky that we were traveling in something of the off-season (September – December and January are their busiest months), so nothing ever felt crowded. In fact, we were often the only couple at the resort pool. Most of the other guests were attending a luxury travel conference, and were in seminars or off-property during the day.
We tried almost all of the on-property restaurants throughout our stay. We had dinner the first night at the Sands Beach Club, a beachfront spot a short walk from our room, which specialized in seafood and local Yucatan flavors.
The second night we ate at Cello, an open-air Italian restaurant in the main property. Cello overlooked the canal that flowed through the main building, and it was so beautiful to watch the boat moving in and out lit by lanterns and candles.
This photo of Saffron is the only one that’s not mine – my photos just didn’t capture the magic!
Our third and fourth nights we ate at Saffron – it was so magical that we immediately knew we needed to return for our final dinner. Built on floating docks over the water, it was an experience.
The Thai food was delicious, yes, but everything from how we were greeted, to the service, to the setting, was just so special. Probably the most magical dining experience we’ve ever had.
This is as good a time as any to mention the service: it was phenomenal – from top to bottom – throughout our stay. The entire staff was so warm and kind, professional, quick to help with anything we needed and eager to make our stay wonderful, especially when they heard it was our anniversary.
One other element I need to mention that added to the magic: our favorite way to move around the resort was actually via the canals, in a boat that ferried us between the beach club and the main property via mangrove-draped canals. For free! We took the boat to and from dinner every evening and it was so lovely.
I mentioned that we didn’t go off-property, and that’s true, but we did have a few adventures on-property.
We rode our bikes on miles of path, we ducked down into a small cenote in the jungle (not one open for swimming), we tried to get close to the little racooon-like animals (coatis!) all over the property, we visited the village center shared with neighboring resorts, and we rented hydro bikes one afternoon for a guided tour through the canals. It was just the two of us and our guide, who told us all about his work as a free diver mapping the hundreds of Riviera Maya cenotes. The water was crystal clear and John was thrilled to see a crocodile.
In addition to these adventures, eating, and relaxing, we had one other priority: our marriage summit. As soon as we decided we were going on this trip, I knew I wanted to use some of our time away to reflect on the past ten years together, and vision cast and dream for the next ten. John and I have realized that our happiness in marriage is fueled in part by gratitude for what we have as well as our shared passion for looking forward with excitement and intention. I knew this was a chance to indulge in both that we could not pass up.
Our summit was nothing fancy, but it was a delight: the quality of the experience was directly related to the conversation and our desire to engage in it, not anything complicated we had planned. To prepare, I spent some time brainstorming a few questions before we left. I wrote each question at the top of a page in a thin notebook; we carried it with us around the resort.
We tackled 2-3 questions a day, while lounging by the pool or the beach or at a meal. Sometimes I’d sit and write while we talked, and sometimes I’d read the question and then we’d talk about it while we waded in the ocean or swam in the pool (and then I’d capture some of what we talked about on the page once we were dry). Some questions were fairly simple to answer, while others generated more than an hour of discussion.
An important note: these questions were designed to help us celebrate God’s goodness in our last ten years of marriage. We were not using this time to problem-solve or give constructive criticism or workshop an issue. Those things are important, and all have their place in our life together, but this was not it, ha. This was meant to be a joy.
I loosely grouped the questions into past, present, and future. Here are some of the questions we used:
THE PAST — What are some of our favorite adventures, trips, meals, and moments from the last 10 years? — Where have we seen God be gracious to us? — What are our keys to a happy marriage?
THE PRESENT — What are our family core values? Our mission statement?
THE FUTURE — What milestones will we mark in the next 10 years? — What adventures do we want to have in the next 10 years? — How do we want to be generous in the next 10 years? — What do we want to be part of our weekly, monthly, or annual rhythms?
The questions that ended up being our favorites to discuss were the keys to our happy marriage and the ways we want to be generous in our life together. I know everyone’s personalities and relationships are different, but I highly recommend trying something like this if you can create time away on a milestone anniversary. The questions themselves and the conversation they generated were wonderful, but just layering them into our days added such a unique and memorable element to our trip. I am so grateful.
And there you have it! A marvelous way to mark a truly marvelous decade of marriage. The decade itself would have been enough, but we are so grateful to have been able to mark it in this way. If you have any questions about our trip or summit or anything else, I’d be happy to help! Thank you, as always, for coming along for the ride!
