Year End Recap: Family & Projects

As I usually do at the end of the year, I look back at what we’ve accomplished around here. It wasn’t a really big year for projects, but we did wrap up a big one that was on our list as well as a few smaller ones. We don’t have a lot left to do in this house (thank goodness) and I’ve been asked, will you sell your house and get another so you will have more projects to do. Absolutely not! I’ve been blogging going on 18 years now and I’ve done so many DIY projects and accomplished a lot of big and small achievements in home renovations, so I can be proud of that and happy and content with where we are. We are getting on up there in age and DIY’s are not as easy anymore and we are so glad we’ve been able to do so much ourselves in this house. Now we will enjoy it! We traveled a lot more this year and enjoyed that so much and will continue to travel in the coming years.

Before I get going on the projects we’ve done, I’ll give you a little recap on Christmas and end of year on my daddy. Daddy is still doing well in memory care. He’s 97 now and his health is holding up pretty well. He’s getting more feeble and some days are better than others as far as walking goes on his walker. Some days I arrive and he’s gone back to bed or hasn’t gotten up for the day. I know that can be normal at his age and it may be expected as someone approaches the end of their life. The care manager and I have talked and she thought we should see if he qualified for hospice yet. I really wish we had gotten hospice involved sooner with mom last year. We didn’t know she would fade so fast and they were only there for her for a few short weeks. Hospice did an evaluation this week on dad and they told me that he doesn’t qualify yet for services. I guess he’s doing too well! We will get him a wheelchair to use when his legs can’t support him anymore. We don’t want him to fall and he has taken a few spills in the last year, luckily nothing broken.

Dad doesn’t bring up mom or anyone at this point and he hasn’t asked about her in months. I think that’s normal too with someone with dementia. He seems pretty content day to day and just talks about the day to day things and not a lot from the past. He knows I’m important, but I’m not sure he knows my name anymore. He always lights up when he sees me walk in, so he knows I’m someone special to him. I just try to look after him weekly and make sure he’s taken care of and he is. They have a hard time getting him to shower once a week, so that’s sometimes a fight. Other than that, he’s mostly agreeable and content and that’s all we can ask for at this stage of life. Thank you as always for loving my daddy. He’s a Godly man who has always relied on his faith to get him through and he still does. When he does get to talking, he will always say things like I’m very grateful that I can still get up and walk and I have a comfortable place to live. I’m so glad he’s content, that makes such a difference!

For the first year ever, my sister and family stayed in Louisiana for Christmas and didn’t come home. They were here for Thanksgiving and Lauren wanted her girls to be in their own home for Christmas, which I totally understand. I missed them, but I’ll go down and visit them all again in the spring and they will be back here too. The girls are growing up so fast and are 10, 8 and 4. Parker is catching up with Lauren in height and is already 5’4″ at 10!

The girls got a new puppy for Christmas which of course, was fun for them! They named her Peaches. Mark and I celebrated Christmas with his family on Christmas Eve and our traditional Christmas day late lunch with his daughters at a Chinese restaurant. Everyone looks forward to that time and it’s a fun tradition. So Christmas has come and gone. It was a good one!

I thought you all would enjoy seeing Mark’s 9 grandchildren lately from his 4 daughters. The 3 youngest all turned 2 in the last couple of months so this was a birthday party. They range from 2 to 12, with 5 boys and 4 girls (the cousins in the middle are holding their sibling babies, except one boy is an only child. The two on the right are siblings of the 2 on the left. You can imagine the activity when they are all together, it’s pretty wild!

Now for the projects this year, not that many, some small and only one big one:

I got my spices organized finally (after 7 years living here). Organizing Spices

This wasn’t our house, but I flew down last spring to visit my sister and BIL and we got their bedroom put together and it turned out gorgeous. Sister’s Master Bedroom

We finally renovated our 3rd bathroom upstairs and made it an Art Deco haven, Mark’s fave. It really turned out so snazzy and we both love this space, with its vintage retro charm. 3rd Bathroom Renovation: Art Deco Inspired

I did a summer deck refresh and added a new table and chairs out here, along with that new umbrella table. We love our outdoor spaces and it was so nice to have the deck floor done last year and everything stained for this year. Summer Deck Refresh

That’s it for this year! Thank you all again for hanging out with me for all these years. Some of you are new, but some of you have been with me since the beginning and I’m so grateful for all of you who choose to follow along with our life journey. It’s had lots of ups and downs, but we thank the Lord for all the blessings he has given us. I will keep on blogging into the New Year, but I will remind you that the best way for all of you to support me is to visit my blog often and every time I put out a post, if you can just come here on the blog and read it, that helps me so much. Blogs and online creators are suffering these days, with all the changes with Google, Pinterest, and other ways to get traffic. We are all down in traffic to our blogs and that makes a huge difference in making a living doing this. So thank you for your support! It’s appreciated more than you know. I couldn’t keep doing this without all your support!

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