Holiday Greetings to our family and friends. 2019 has been a fabulous year. We moved in our new home the last few weeks of 2018, so 2019 has been much less chaotic with regards to moving! We are feeling more settled, but still lots of things to do.
January and February were fairly uneventful other than surviving the typical winter in Ohio. In March we have our trifecta of birthdays to celebrate Princess K turned 5 and Prince K turned 2, and Daddy had his birthday as well. (30 plus one of the kids ages, I’ll let you guess which one. 🙂 So we had a princess party and a construction party. We did a photo shoot in March for their birthdays too.
Moving into May, Dustin enjoyed a week with his teammates in Canada prior to starting his sabbatical for 3 months. During the 3 months the plan was to finish the deck and start the basement. Unfortunately the crew we had doing the structure was held up by county permits and wasn’t able to start until end of June so it slowed the project a bit.
Prior to the start of the deck, we enjoyed a week in Hilton Head Island in early May with Dustin’s parents. It was theirs and the kids first visit to HHI and it was a success! Perfect weather and good food! I wrote a post on PharmToTable.Life with some of our favorites and about our vacation meal planning process!
In June, Princess K had her dance recital. She’s been in dance for the last few years, but this was the first time she took tap and ballet. She performed with just one other little girl a ballet number to Fly to Your Heart, and she and small group of tap dances performed to Party in the USA. She loves dance! In the fall she started jazz instead of tap, and is continuing ballet. During the last week of June she also went to gymnastics camp with one of her besties that moved to Texas in July. We have a few friends in San Antonio now that we need to visit in 2020.
We had a super rainy June so it was a little bit of a blur, but July came and Dustin had most of the deck completed except the stairs, his dad came towards the end a couple weekends and helped him with the stairs!
This summer was also super fun because our little prince did ISR swim lessons and he was loving the pool. We had a local pool membership and swam as much as we could. Even into Sept this year, the pool was closed but thankfully some of our friends had their pool still open on Sept 30th when it was 85 degrees!
In early August we also did a photo shoot in our new kitchen for my blog, but we haven’t gotten it updated yet. 🙂
School started back in mid August, Princess K started kindergarten and Prince K started Little Explorers just a couple hours a week. We absolutely love Spanish Immersion and wish the school went beyond 1st grade. I’m pretty sure I’m going to cry when they have to go to another school. I’ve contemplated moving somewhere they do have a full Spanish immersion program but after moving 3 times last year, I remind myself I don’t want to do that again for a long time! It’s so amazing though to listen to her communicate in Spanish.
Dustin and I took a trip, just us, to St. John in October which was wonderful. The USVI are beautiful and swimming in the ocean there seemed like we were in a dream. I’m a little behind on life, but maybe when I catch up, I’ll do a post with our St. John favorites. This blog has a been a little neglected this year because of other adventures.
One of those adventures is we launched a new website called FunctionalMedicineCE.com to help share the good news about a functional medicine approach to disease with other pharmacists looking to learn more. We had our first virtual conference in November and it went very well. We are looking forward to the next one on Leap Day 2020.
Fall pictures are our fav! We created a colleague on our wall recently with fall photos form the last several years.
We had Thanksgiving celebrations with both sides and our neighbors. We have been so blessed to have such a great community in our neighborhood.
December has been a bit more low key than normal, because Kellen needed an ISR refresher, I stayed home from Midyear so I could help transport him there since it’s 10 min every day of the week. But it was fun to be here for my birthday and spend more time decorating for Christmas with the kiddos.
Last December we were in our house for about 4 days, and this year we are only taking about 4 days away to spend at Grandma and Grandpa’s.
Definitely a contrast but both were great! We are looking forward to Disney World in January and crossing our fingers for warm enough weather to have some beach time too.
Praying your home is filled with the true purpose of Christmas, and that as you reflect on 2019 that you see God’s blessings even through hard times. We also pray that 2020 fills your home with peace, love, joy, along with lots of laughter and smiles!
The Hartzlers
DustinAndMelody.com 