2024 Year in Review
Here it is, the 2024 year in review! This year looked a little different than previous years, but it has been amazing nonetheless.
2024 Year in Review | Set Design
In February, I helped create the set for the Finding Nemo junior musical at my daughter's school. I made multiple coral reefs with help from students, teachers and parents, and we all had so much fun doing it! Everything was created out of pool noodles, chicken wire, tissue paper, and other recycled materials. This project took a lot of time, but it looked so incredible when we were done. It was even able to be reused for another school for their production of the SpongeBob musical!
2024 Year in Review | Epoxy
2024 was my year of doing epoxy projects. I got some gorgeous raw wood at the end of 2023 that I decided to use for several different projects. The first of those projects was a mug holder for my mom. She wanted to be able to hang all of her Polish pottery mugs in one place. She even ordered Polish pottery hooks for them to hang on. This was a fun experiment for me because I was able to see what it was like to drill holes through already cured epoxy, which I was originally terrified of doing because I thought it would ruin it, but turns out it didn't, so it worked out fine. It turned out, though, that it ended up being too long for my mom's kitchen. So I had to practice my skills again by making a smaller one for her.
The next epoxy project that I did was making a new table to go over my mom's washer and dryer in her laundry room. I absolutely loved working with the wormy maple. It was so gorgeous! Filling all the holes in with epoxy and topping it with two coats of epoxy made it nice and smooth and then I built a frame for it to sit on. I love that this gives her a little bit more depth on top of the washer and dryer so she can put baskets there and nothing falls behind the washer and drier.
The last epoxy project I did was an entry bench for just inside the garage door at my parents’ house. I used a slab of cedar for this project and I cannot tell you how much I loved it! The epoxy really brought out the red in the wood. It was so bright and bold and looked absolutely stunning. I tried a few new techniques when working on this piece. Some of them worked, some of them did not, but that's how you get better, right? I stained some 2x4s to match the color of the cedar and then built a frame for the cedar piece to sit on top of. My mom ended up with an absolutely gorgeous piece.
2024 Year in Review | Downloads
I did quite a few new downloads this year. I was not planning on doing most of these, but they popped up as a necessity because we were living in Buenos Aires for the second half of the year. I created a "Going Shopping" social story that was specifically to help my daughter while we were out shopping, but it was easily transferrable to anyone else. I also created a download for a few different transportation social stories including: Ferry Boat, Train Travel and Public Transit. We went on a ferry boat trip to Uruguay from Buenos Aires that was really difficult for my daughter to go through the process because it's very different from flying. I know there are so many different modes of transportation people use so I wanted to include as many as I could so other individuals to be prepared as well.
I introduced the "Life Skills" download series that so far include: Taking a Bath, Tying Shoes and Brushing Teeth. I've put a lot of work into the Life Skills Series because I wanted to have multiple versions of each life skill so they were accessible to the most amount of people. I also created a dental hygiene social story to accompany the Brushing Teeth life skill download. Dental hygiene ended up being a struggle for my daughter while in Argentina so I felt like it was the perfect time to do this.
2024 Year in Review | Travel, Travel, Travel
We spent June through December of 2024 living in Buenos Aires, Argentina for my husband's job. We decided to pack up the kids and have the experience together and it was incredible! While we were there, we also able to visit a few other places in South America. We went to Colonial de Sacramento, Uruguay, that is just an hour and a half ferry ride away from Buenos Aires. We were only there for 36 hours, but we had so much fun! We rented a golf cart instead of a car and we were able to get all over the city. I would highly recommend doing that. We stayed in a cute Airbnb while we were there, and would have liked to stay a little bit longer, but there were some travel issues that prevented that.
Our next trip was to Iguazu Falls, which is in the north of Argentina, bordering Brazil and Paraguay. We got to see both the Argentine side of the falls and the Brazil side of the falls. It was a beautiful day when we say the Argentine side and were were able to see tons of animals. The falls were incredible! When we went to the Brazil side of the falls, however, it was pouring rain so we didn't see any animals. It was still such an incredibly cool experience to see the falls that way. The kids absolutely loved it!
When my family came to visit us in Buenos Aires in October, we did a day trip up to Tigre, which is where the river meets the sea. We spent a lot of the day on a boat exploring the delta and did a tour from the docks. From what I understand, people love to come here in the summer as a retreat from the heat. It's beautiful and the food is 10/10.
Our last trip was to Patagonia. We went to Puerto Madryn on the east side of Argentina. We explored the dinosaur museum at Trelew and got to see the longest dinosaur bones ever found in the world! We also did a penguin tour with the El Petral estate, which I think might have been the highlight of my daughter’s life so far. Our guides took us to a lighthouse and then to a private estate bordering the the penguin colony, which was incredible. We got to be up close and personal with these penguins, see their nests. On the last day of this trip we went to explore Peninsula Valdez, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We saw so many amazing animals because we were right on the ocean. We also went to San Lorenzo Estate to see the largest Magellanic penguin colony in the world, which, again, was absolutely amazing for my daughter.
We are now back home in Tennessee, exhausted from our adventures but so excited for what's to come in 2025. Stay tuned for a lot of big impact projects! Happy New Year!
