Once again it's time for my favorite blog post of the year (and the longest post of the year!). Let's recap all that happened in my life in 2024. Spoiler alert: a lot of life change! And that's what inspired me to change my Word of the Year halfway through the year for the first time ever. My original word of the year was "Celebrate" but I changed it to "Transform." 2024 definitely became an incredibly transformational year for me.
2024 Summary:
This year was starkly defined by two major life events: my wedding, and the unexpected loss of my radio career. So much of my average day-to-day life this year somehow related back to these two major events. Overall though, it was a better year for me than 2023 was. Ryan and I were both incredibly blessed this year not to have any major health issues, and for that I will always be so thankful (after 2023 brought a couple of them for me).
It was a busy year! Not only did my average weekly routine get majorly shaken up when I lost my previous job and started a new one, but there were also so many special celebratory occasions this year. We had everything to do with our wedding, and my 30th birthday. Several of my dear friends also got married this year, so that brought additional weddings, showers and bachelorettes to my calendar! Others had milestone birthdays as well, or welcomed babies into the world. I really enjoyed getting to share my wedding year with so many other celebratory occasions for others that I love! It made the year so much more festive and fun (albeit busy and a bit expensive 😊).
One sad note from the year was that my grandma (mom's mom) passed away in August at the age of 99. I was so hopeful she would get to her 100th birthday in February 2025. Although that didn't happen, I'm still so thankful that she lived such a long and fruitful life. She was truly quite a woman!
2024 Accomplishments:
I became a married woman on November 16th, 2024! After spending such a large portion of my 20s single and longing for the next stage of life, I will never take for granted that it finally happened for me, with a great guy at that. We got engaged on November 19th, 2023, so it is kind of cool that we got married almost exactly a year to the day later. I cannot wait to see the wonderful life that Ryan and I continue to build together as we begin our journey as husband and wife!
Building on to this- planning my wedding successfully was one of my greatest accomplishments not only this year, but also in adulthood! I would say that I planned 95% of my wedding completely myself. Ryan, my parents, and Ryan's parents were helpful with a few things that I don't want to discount, but the truth is I did do the majority of planning myself and with little assistance. (I did hire a wedding coordinator, but the package we purchased was really only for month-of coordination). I wish I could tell you that everything went totally smoothly and without a hitch. Of course, that wasn't the case. 😉 I unfortunately did deal in both the months leading up to the wedding and the wedding day itself with some difficult disappointments with certain wedding vendors. I've been trying to give myself grace in the weeks following the wedding by telling myself that some of these truly were unforeseen circumstances, and I still did the best job I could planning my wedding with what I knew at the time. I'm also proud of myself for sticking to the agreed upon budget fairly well from my parents, and also the money that Ryan and I agreed to contribute ourselves to our own day and honeymoon. I feel like for the size of wedding I had, I had a lower budget than a lot of people I know who had similarly sized weddings. But I really did my best to cut cost corners where we could, and I'm proud of that! I have much more to share about that in more Wedding Wednesday posts next year.
I am also so proud of myself for surviving the crushing loss of my former career in radio. I was laid off unexpectedly in April 2024, just seven months ahead of my wedding. 2024 proved to be a brutal year for the radio industry. I was just one of thousands all over the country who lost a broadcasting job this year due to a changing industry landscape that brought financial hardships. I knew right away after this happened that there wouldn't be a future for me in radio as a full-time career anymore. So it wasn't just the loss of this specific job, but a full career loss that I endured.
When you go through something like this in life, you can either sink or swim. I chose to swim as hard as I could, and I'm so proud of that. A month after losing my radio job, I began a new job in the hospitality field. I've been front desk agent at a local hotel since May 2024. I started my new job Memorial Day Week, which was honestly quite chaotic as Virginia Beach is quite a popular vacation destination for holiday weekends! But I got through that tough first week, and now I end 2024 still happy to be part of the front desk team at this hotel. I was also honored to be chosen at the Employee of the Month in October 2024, which is honestly one of my proudest accomplishments of the year! I am still figuring out if I'll be in hospitality longterm and what is next for me career-wise, but I can end this year proud of myself for diving as best as I could into a totally new-to-me field, and trying to make lemonade out of the lemons with my job situation this year.
2024 Travels:
This year in travel brought two trips to Caribbean Islands, two bachelorette trips out-of-state for girlfriends, finally getting to take Ryan to my favorite city, and spending more time back home in Maine in one calendar year than I have since 2015. Whew!! Below are my travel highlights and their corresponding blog posts for the year.
January - Raleigh, NC
August - Charlottesville, VA (also made trips in February and March)
December - Washington, DC
2024 Visitors:
For the first year since 2013, I didn't host any overnight guests. 😕 I love hosting and it is truly one of my love languages, but this just wasn't the year for doing a lot of it, between a career and schedule change for me, a demanding year at work for Ryan, and wedding planning occupying a lot of free time. I am hoping to get back to hosting some overnight guests in 2025!
While they stayed in hotels for both trips, my parents did visit twice from Maine! They came in May for our engagement party, and in November for a week for our wedding. I do feel blessed for how much time I spent with my parents in 2024 between their two trips down here and my three trips to Maine.
2024 Winter Memories:
The year got off to a surprisingly wonderful start. It kind of reminded me a bit of Winter 2020, which was also a wonderful winter season for me. (And I was kind of wondering in the back of my mind like 2020 if things were about to go downhill in the spring... and sure enough they kinda did when I lost my job! 😅 Lol.) Ryan and I took two fun weekend trips to North Carolina in January, which helped a normally long and dreary month to be more exciting. I also unexpectedly found my wedding dress in January! I bought the first wedding dress I ever tried on at a sample sale in Virginia Beach. I also attended a whopping four different Galentines celebrations in February, which added lots of joy and fun to the rest of the winter season. 2024 wedding celebrations started to kick off with my friend Emily J's bridal shower up in Charlottesville. And we also started making great strides in our own wedding planning! We booked our ceremony church, reception venue, photographer, florist and wedding coordinator in the winter months. Things were starting not to go as well at my radio job, but I felt so blessed to have had so many great things going on for me outside of work in these months.
2024 Spring Memories:
March was another busy and fun month. I traveled to Charleston for Emily J's bachelorette party, and got there via a fun road trip with my friend Megan. Emily and her husband Sean then got married in April, and that was our first wedding of the year! Ryan and I also traveled to Puerto Rico for a family vacation / belated birthday trip for him! We also took our engagement photos in Downtown Norfolk in March, and I loved how they turned out. I had fun designing our save-the-dates and officially mailing them in April! I lost my job on April 19th, and time stood still for me a bit after that. I then left for a solo road trip home to Maine, where I spent time grieving and processing everything. I came back to Virginia beach just a few days before our engagement party. It was tough to get into a celebratory engagement mood just three weeks after one of the worst days of my life, but the party ended up being so wonderful. I'm so glad and grateful that we did have an engagement party! Spring wrapped up with me starting my new job as a front desk agent at a local hotel right before Memorial Day.
2024 Summer Memories:
Summer is when I really started to feel like myself again post-job loss, and I was also starting to feel a bit more settled in working at the hotel. It was an unusual summer with now having to work a lot of weekends and having more weekdays off, but I made the best of it! A real highlight was my friend Emily B.'s bachelorette trip in Highlands, NC. I had never been to that part of North Carolina before, and it was so charming and naturally beautiful! On the wedding front, things really ramped up! This summer brought my own first bridal shower back home in Maine, my friend Maddy's bridal shower, my friend Lily's bridal shower, and Emily and Luke's wedding. A sad thing that happened this summer was the loss of my grandmother in Maine at the age of 99. She is the only living grandparent that I ever knew, as the others all passed before I was born. I was really hoping she would make it to turn 100 in February 2025, but I take peace knowing she did still live a very long and full life.
My 30th birthday kicked off the fall season and coincided with my second bridal shower and bachelorette party weekend. Talk about a celebratory September!! Later on in the month, my friend Amanda and I did our annual girls' trip. This year we did a day trip instead of a full weekend away. Ryan and I attended his Uncle Mike's big 60th birthday party, and attended my friend Maddy and her husband Trent's wedding. I also attended my friend Lily's wedding to her husband Andy with several of my Charlottesville girlfriends. Ryan. and I also snuck in a quick weekend in DC for a Commanders football game (my first NFL game!). Another fun milestone for me this fall was hitting 75 Jazzercise classes for the year (I ended the year with just shy of 100). Next came our wedding and honeymoon, but December had some fun to close out the year as well. I hosted my 4th Annual Favorite Things Party, and my friend Caroline and I did our annual Colonial Williamsburg Christmas day trip (this time with her mom and our husbands!). My final trip of the year was an amazing weekend in DC with my friend Alex, which was made extra memorable by running into PARIS HILTON and getting to meet her!
2024 Weddings:
February - 97.3 The Eagle Mass Wedding
April - Emily & Sean
June - Dana & Morgan (I sadly was not able to make their wedding, but was so thrilled that they were able to attend ours!)
November - MY WEDDING! 😊
January - Shen Yun performance
August - Pitbull & T-Pain
December - iHeart Radio Jingle Ball (Tate McRae, Kesha, Jason DeRulo, Gracie Abrams, The Kid Laroi and more)
5 Favorite Memories of 2024:
1. The first full day of our honeymoon. There was the perfect balance of excitement and relaxation. I was in absolute bliss, and it's a day I wish I could re-live!
2. The night before our wedding. Specifically our welcome party! (I barely have any photos from it, so using a photo of the bridal party and I from our church rehearsal beforehand for this photo collage.) I know you might think it's insane that I rank the night before the wedding as better than my actual wedding day, but it's honestly the truth when I think back. We had such a good turnout at our welcome party, and it was my first time in years seeing many family members and longtime friends who traveled to be with us. The amount of joy and anticipation I felt that night for the next day was truly one of the greatest highs of my life!
3. Our Wedding Day!! My specific favorite parts of the day: being on the altar with Ryan during our church ceremony, doing a "first look" with our reception ballroom and seeing it all set up before they allowed guests in, and dancing my butt off with friends and family to the wedding playlist that I made and was extremely proud of! 😉
4. My bachelorette party in Edenton, NC! Now that it's all said and done, I'm very happy I did a one night party that was fairly close to home and allowed me to invite a lot more friends, vs. a longer duration and expensive bachelorette trip with a smaller group.
5. The first day exploring Highlands, NC on my friend Emily's bachelorette trip.
Blog - Readers' Favorite Posts of 2024:
Blog - Top Selling Items of 2024:
1. Free Assembly Plaid Midi Dress (By far the best selling item of the year, thanks to this Reel! Still can't believe what a good deal this dress was.)
2. Free Assembly Embellished Button Down (I've been wearing this at least a couple times a week since I got it in November! Perfect for this time of year.)
3. Old Navy Pixie Skinny Ankle Pants (My most worn pants at my new job as a front desk agent.)
4. KISS Brush On Nail Glue (The irony is I don't even use this nail glue anymore for my press-ons, but it does well selling for me thanks to an older blog post that I linked it in!)
5. LOFT Shimmery Green Blouse (Another ironic item on here because while I thought this shirt was so gorgeous, the cut and sizing didn't flatter me and I ended up returning mine.)
Highlights From My Year posts from years passed:
God Bless,
xoxo Annaliese
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