2024: Another Full Year
As I look back through my photos from 2024, I keep thinking the same thing I did when I looked back at 2023: this was a full year.
Some of it made it into videos. A lot of it didn’t.
And while I had every intention of keeping up with the blog, the farm, work, family, and everything else had other ideas. So here’s the rest of the year — the things that happened in between the videos and the day-to-day life on the farm.
If you want to see more of what’s happening around the farm, the GFY Farms channel is still where a lot of that gets documented.
Winter on the Farm
The year started with snow, farm chores, hockey games and another Chiefs playoff run.
In February, I went to the Chiefs Super Bowl parade by myself. It was supposed to be a day of celebrating another championship, but the shooting at the end of the parade changed everything. I talked about the day and my thoughts about what happened in a video, so I’ll leave it at that here.
Spring brought kidding season, including two sets of triplets in less than 24 hours. There is nothing quite like looking out at the barnyard and suddenly realizing you have a whole lot more baby goats than you did the day before.
We also had our first pig processed in April. That was another one of those farm milestones that makes you realize how much has changed since we started this whole thing.
I went morel hunting, too, and ended up making a deer stew with some of the meat we’d saved from an earlier hunt. Apparently, that’s just what life looks like around here now.
A Few Things We Probably Didn’t Need
At some point during the year, we had four Jeeps sitting in the front yard.
I’m not sure how that happened.
The boys also got a go-kart running, which gave us another toy to play with, and we bought a dump truck on a whim (we do have uses for it… but it still was an impulse purchase).
We still haven’t used the dump truck.
So… there’s that.
Reno, Again
I made it back to Reno in 2024 for the Women’s National Bowling Tournament.
This time I flew instead of taking the RV, and my bowling friends and I got to do some exploring while we were there. We visited Virginia City, Lake Tahoe, and Emerald Bay.
I might write about that trip someday. There was definitely enough going on to make a post out of it, but for now, it gets a place in the year-end recap.
A Little Health Wake-Up Call
July brought something that wasn’t quite as fun.
I ended up in the ER after experiencing chest tension and pressure. I had been at work when it started, and after trying to push through for a while, I finally decided I needed to get checked out.
Thankfully, nothing serious was found, but it scared me.
It was one of those moments that makes you stop and pay attention to things you might have been ignoring.
At the time, I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do with that realization. I just knew I needed to start paying more attention to myself.
Summer Challenges and Time with Family
There were plenty of good things happening, too. Chris, the boys and I got the opportunity to attend a family retreat. In addition to bonding activities, there were also a lot of challenges that required us to lean on each other — I will let the pictures tell the story!
We even made a stop in Uranus, MO on the way home from the retreat – yes, that is a real place.
We also spent some time in Maryland at my sister’s. It was a work trip that I extended to make family time. My daughter came with us and my parents came up from Florida. A true family reunion.
Chris and I went to an Orioles game, which resulted in one of my more interesting outfit combinations — Chiefs, Royals, and Orioles all represented at once. Chris stuck to the Chiefs and since they had beaten the Ravens just the night before, we did receive some jabs, but they were all in good fun.
But one of my favorite parts of that trip was getting the four-generation family photos. I know these will be cherished memories.
Making More of What We Have
Fall meant more preserving, because I am still slowly working on filling our cabinets with as much as possible from our own production. I even made bacon from our own pork belly this year.
There’s something really satisfying about taking something from the farm or the garden and turning it into something we’re going to eat later. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also one of the reasons we started doing all of this in the first place.
And Then We Hit a Deer
One of the bigger stories of the year happened on the way home from a Chiefs game in December.
We hit a deer.
We were fine… but the Jeep was totaled.
And somehow, that wasn’t the end of the story.
There was a very late-night ATV recovery, a lot of work afterward, and eventually a whole lot of meat in the freezer.
I’m going to save the full story for another post, because there is definitely more to it than I can fit into this recap.
Let’s just say that by the time it was over, we had turned a really unfortunate night into something useful.
I’ll tell that story next.
Florida With Samuel
I finished the year with a road trip to Florida with Chris’s son Samuel.
We made a few stops along the way, including Garden of the Gods in Illinois, and once we got to Florida we saw manatees, visited the Kennedy Space Center, and went on a fishing charter.
It was one of those trips where the getting there was part of the adventure.
We made it home January 2, which means I technically started 2025 somewhere on the road.
Looking Ahead
I don’t really have a “vision” for 2025… I never have been one for resolutions.
I know there are changes coming, there always are. I know there are things I’ve been thinking about for a while. And I know there will probably be a few things I never saw coming.
That’s pretty much how 2024 went, too.
There was the daily grind of work, farm milestones, family adventures, unexpected detours, some hard moments, and a whole lot of ordinary days that somehow added up to a pretty full year.
And maybe that’s what this stage of life is supposed to look like.
Not everything needs to become a big story.
Sometimes it’s just the life you’re living.
And I’m pretty happy with the one I’m creating.
