January first means it's time to bust out the old 2024 journal, grab the new 2025 journal, and fill out some notes!
Every year my wife and I spend a chunk of time on Jan 1st or 2nd looking back on the last year and writing out our highlights, lowlights, interesting things that happened, and our goals for the next year. We've done it since 2016 and it has been a lot of fun to look back at through the years.
Some years we have a lot of lowlights or very significant lowlights, like in 2019 when my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer and subsequently passed away. Or during COVID when everything was in lockdown.
I'm happy to say, this was not one of those years. Honestly, 2024 might have the lowest number of lowlights since we started tracking things this way. A quarter of the year was taken up with my final recovery and return to health, and another quarter was my wife's final months of pregnancy and the birth of our little girl.
Her arrival was a fantastic highlight of the year and went a long way to making this year memorable and fun. Adjusting to 3 kids you'd think would be a linear difficulty scale from 2 -> 3. I have not found this to be the case. This might be because my son is school-aged and my first daughter is not quite school age... so she gets bored and is around the house all day while the baby also has, y'know, normal baby needs. Having my eldest while my middle child was a baby seemed relatively easy - but juggling two kids 6 and 3 with a baby is a bit more chaotic. We've mostly gotten a good system now, but it definitely wasn't as simple as I'd expected.
All that said, we finally got a moment yesterday to sit down and transfer important information from our 2024 planners into 2025 planners, and review our prior year and get that journaled. It definitely had more noteworthy moments than some years - what with the year starting with 3 banks collapsing in the US and then ending with Luigi becoming the folk hero of the masses for gunning down a parasitic CEO in the street. Add to that bridge collapses, Israel goose-stepping into genocide, and all the rest... well, it's a year to remember for sure.
With that all done, I managed to spend some time detailing a map I made playing Four Against Darkness with one of my nephews over the holidays. He really enjoyed the game, so I ended up gifting him my copy so he can continue to play it when he goes back to British Columbia.
I didn't complete this one yet, but it's starting to come along. I had planned to do more but it took like 3 solid hours to convince my daughter to actually sleep last night... which ate into both my writing time and my creative time. Such is being a parent!