2024 Summary

 2024 is in the books!

Here is the one and only photo made of the entire family for the whole year! We had a glorious lake day this summer!  We forgot to make a family photo during the holidays.  Having too much fun, I guess.  

The biggest event of 2024 for us was the birth of our third grandchild in early September - Caleb and Meredith's first.  He is healthy and super cute.  If you see me in person, I have plenty of photos to prove it!  This photo also features a 4th grandchild in the womb!  Rebecca and Joseph's 3rd child is due in early February of 2025.  

2024 started off with a bang as we flew to Greece and worked in a refugee camp on Lesvos for a few weeks.  Working in a refugee camp really stretches us, but I can't say enough good things about working with EuroRelief.  You can read more about our time at camp here.  

Our other trip in 2024 was a camping/hiking trip on the East Coast.  We attempted to summit Katahdin (the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail) but didn't make it due to rain and a late start.  We already have plans to try again before we get too old!  We took some other awesome hikes in Acadia before coming back through Shenandoah National Park.   

During the summer we celebrated a wedding (our niece, Hannah), some birthdays, and a national championship in baseball, and also just enjoyed hanging at the pool and lake and spending time with friends and family.  Terry worked getting several properties ready to rent and sell, and I helped lots of students with their reading! 

All the kids are doing well.  Rebecca and Joseph are still in Richmond but hope to move back to the Knoxville area in 2025!  Nathan is still working in the trauma ICU at UT.  He took an epic trip to Machu Picchu in the spring.  Caleb and Meredith are doing great being new parents!  Caleb took a new job as a tax accountant with Covenant Health.  Noah relocated to Chattanooga and is working full time at Whole Foods and doing some part-time theater work.  

This year we will celebrate 35 years of marriage!  I am having fun planning our epic camping trip to New Zealand to celebrate!  We also have some exciting things coming up that I hope to share more about in 2025. 

Best books:  Wow, 2024 was a bad reading year.  I started so many books that I didn't even finish, and I don't think I read a single fiction book that I could whole-heartedly recommend.  A good non-fiction book I read was Suzanne Stelling’s “Woodbine Chronicles” - about her adventure loving her Knoxville neighborhood.  I also enjoyed several audiobooks - listening to lots of celebrity biographies for some reason.  My favorite was "Forever Young" by Hayley Mills.    

But  . . . I started reading the Psalms very intentionally this year.  I read through it completely every month from May to December.  I felt surrounded by the steadfast love of the Lord every time I picked it up (Psalm 32:10).  I plan to stay in the Psalms for my devotional time for the foreseeable future!

Best movie:  this may be the first year that I remember where we didn’t see a single movie at the theater!  

Best moment:  Birth of our new grandson in September

Best meal:  chicken pasta in Athens

Best sporting event:  College World Series where Tennessee won

Best decision:  NOT to attend the College Football Playoff game at Ohio State

Best celestial event:  solar eclipse in April

Best date:  Hiking the Precipice Trail and e-biking the carriage roads in Acadia National Park

Some of the best things that happened are more personal and/or not for the internet.  I will thank the Lord privately for those.  Some heartbreaks happened, too, and I'm thankful I can take those to God as well.  Being in Psalms so much has reiterated to me that I can share all my thoughts and emotions with a God who cares and understands.  

Summer Events!

Our only travel this summer was in early June when we went to Arkansas for Hannah and Zane's wedding.  

We're missing Nathan (in Peru) and a few of the great-grandchildren 

all the girl cousins

After the wedding fun, we enjoyed some extended family time at the pool and in the backyard!

As soon as we arrived back in Knoxville, we got together with the OTHER side of the family to celebrate Liz's 85th birthday!  She makes 85 look fantastic!

The next big summer event (since we have no photos of the 4th of July) was a baby shower for Caleb and Meredith!  We had a very full house, and it was a lot of fun!

Here are a few more random photos from the summer of '24. 

National Champions!

Rocky learns to swim!

Baby #3 on the way!

Morning peaches

Fun times with Gran

Altogether for one glorious day on the water

Taking Melanie to S. Holston Lake

Terry ordered random orange flowers off the internet.  They grew like gangbusters!  

It may look like we're having fun, but we were burning up! Left before the first quarter was over. 

ALTA Conference

ALTA (Academic Language Therapy Association) is the group I am licensed through for dyslexia therapy.  I still feel like I have a lot to learn to be a better therapist, so I decided to attend the national conference in Little Rock.  Being at the conference was an interesting dynamic.  All the displays and conference sessions were directly applicable to what I do every day, so that was great, but I didn't really know anyone and had no one to hang out with.  I've discovered that educators (well, maybe just all of us) tend to hang around in groups (hey, some of these groups even had their own T-shirts, which does seem like an educator thing to me!), and I'm not enough of an extravert to really overcome that.  So evenings and most meals were just quiet, alone times.  I did take some pretty walks down by the river.  And I did make two new friends - one who hosts my favorite dyslexia podcast!  

The first evening, I got to have dinner with Casey Harrison, who co-hosts the podcast Together in Literacy, which is one of my favorites.  I hear her voice a lot when I'm walking and driving in the car, so it was so fun to chat in person!  

My other friend - an educator from Memphis.  We enjoyed hanging out together and probably would have done more, but her husband was also in town for business.  

All the rest of these photos are from walks along the Arkansas River.  There were lots of bridges and cool sculptures.   

Eclipse 2024

We had so much fun seeing the eclipse in 2017 (see this post), that I decided we'd see the next one in Arkansas if at all possible. Seven years went by much quicker than expected. You'd think with seven years to plan, we wouldn't have been trying to figure out where to view it from at the last minute! We settled on seeing it in Hardy, Arkansas, where they would have 4 minutes of totality.  We watched from the vacation home of Dale and Mary Beth Berry, friends from Knoxville.  

We stopped at a Sonic on our way to Hardy to try their new "Black-out" slush.  It looked an asphalt slushy, but it sure tasted good!

Hanging out and waiting for the magic on the banks of the Spring River

Ann and David had special T-shirts

Finally totality

A few magical moments of dusk in the middle of the day

On the way back to Tennessee, we decided to stop at Reelfoot Lake, where we'd never been.  Got a great campsite that had already been paid for by someone who viewed the eclipse and left.  

                                                    

We'll see if we make it to 2044!