2024 Year in Review

The hardest year

year in review

2024 was not quite what I, or my family, expected. It had its highlights, but in general has been the hardest year of my life and full of some of the lowest lows I’ve experienced.

I’ll start with the highlights, and then dig into the lows (which get very personal, so forewarning on that).

The good

The primary highlight of my year was attending Laracon US in August. I made a larger post on Twitter about that experience here. I met so many amazing people and despite not working in Laravel professionally, I fully plan to attend every year as time allows.

The other highlight of my year was a 2 week cruise in Norway! My dad had asked my wife and I earlier in the summer if we’d want to go on a trip with them (specifically a cruise), and to let them know where we wanted to go, anywhere in the world. My wife’s family is very Norwegian - the first of their family to immigrate was only 3 generations back! So naturally, we chose Norway. We started in Copenhagen, Denmark, and traveled all the way up the coast of Norway and ended in Tromso. It was an incredibly beautiful (and long) trip, and experiencing 24 hours of sunlight every single day was a very unique experience.

Professionally, there isn’t really anything to write home about. I’ve continued to work at a small Christian media company, and generally enjoy my work (despite my complaints here and there) and love all my coworkers dearly. We had our yearly onsite in September, and it was great to connect with everyone.

The bad

Now to the meat of this year.

Back in January, my wife (Kelsey) and I decided it was time to build a family. Kelsey wanted to be a mom more than anything in the world, and is probably the single most equipped woman I’ve ever known for exactly that. She came off birth control in January, and our OBGYN told us to expect the first 6-9 months to be a bit of a wash as her body adjusted, so we went in with that mindset.

2 months later though - we were pregnant! We couldn’t believe it, and I vividly remember being in complete shock. The day we found out, I’d had a terrible day at work and was just totally mentally out of it, so I just kinda sat in the bathroom in disbelief while my wife was sprinting around our room out of pure joy.

Kelsey and I are very blessed to be a part of a wonderful community of young couples here, and by this point one of the couples had a newborn, and the other had gotten pregnant about a month before us. Kelsey was incredibly excited to be pregnant right alongside one of her best friends of all time. Life was terrifying at this point, but amazing and blessed.

Then, near the end of May, Kelsey got incredibly sick. No idea what it was, just some sort of virus, but she had an extreme fever for days, couldn’t eat and could hardly drink, and we ended up going to the ER. This sucked, but as part of it, the ER doc decided to do a basic ultrasound to make sure our little baby was all good. And it was! We had our dating/gender ultrasound scheduled for 2 weeks after this, but amazingly we got to see our little baby’s heartbeat 2 weeks ahead of time. I’m not an incredibly emotional person, but the ER crew definitely got to see some tears from both of us that day, and that was the day it really set in that this was real and we were going to be a family.

So all is good, and we’re riding a wave of pure happiness, and finally get to our dating ultrasound in the beginning of June. I’m mostly ignorant to the pregnancy process, or medical process throughout, so the ultrasound went mostly as I expected. However, afterwards, my wife said she felt like something was wrong, and pointed out that the ultrasound tech had never asked if we wanted to hear/see the heartbeat. I brushed it off as forgetfulness on the tech’s part, and my wife is a very anxious person so I mostly assumed her brain was working overtime.

2 hours later we got the call that changed our entire year. There was no more heartbeat. There was nothing. I will never forget this moment, as much as I try. All I could think was that it wasn’t real. After all, we had just seen the heartbeat 2 weeks ago. What could possibly have changed in that time? I’ll never forget Kelsey’s reaction. It was the most visceral, shattered emotions I have ever seen, and pray to never see again. We had lost our baby, and there was nothing that could be done about it.

Unfortunately, the complications continued after this. Kelsey’s body was not processing the miscarriage, so she had to get surgery. Our OBGYN gave us the option to have genetic testing done, which would potentially give us insight into what had happened and also let us know the gender. We opted for this, and a few weeks later found out that it had been a little baby girl (who we’ve named Thea), and she had Turner’s syndrome. Turner’s is a random chromosomal deficiency, and accounts for a large percentage of miscarriages. Not the fault of either of our bodies - it’s just something that can happen. We were thankful to have closure.

We continued trying as soon as we could after the surgery (which was in mid-June), and unfortunately to this day we have been unsuccessful. Kelsey’s body did not recover well after the surgery and is only recently (like this month) starting to feel normal again. Life has continued throwing us various curveballs throughout the last 6 months, and there has been a lot of late nights of sitting on the couch with tears in our eyes feeling like we can’t catch a break across the board.

I’ve learned a lot through this experience, and it’s mainly that grief is weird, and different for everyone. Nobody processes emotions the same way, and some linger a lot more for some people than others. There’s good days and bad days, and days where everything comes flooding back for whatever reason.

Through all this, a positive I take from it is that our marriage is stronger than I could have ever imagined, and we’ve both grown immensely as people throughout the year. We were joking last night that our love for each other and being with each other is almost inconvenient, as we’re both perfectly happy to say no to social gatherings or other things just to have more time to hang out just the two of us, despite coming up on 5 years of marriage.

All that said (and thank you if you’ve made it this far), we have no expectations for 2025, and frankly no set goals. We had a lot of those at the beginning of 2024, and almost none came to fruition. So this year, we’re just taking whatever God has in store for us, and doing our best to continue growing both as a couple and as Christians.

Happy new year, and thanks for reading ❤️