I’ll be honest, I almost didn’t write this post. We both aren’t really happy with how 2018 went for us. We didn’t accomplish the majority of our goals, we didn’t get to travel to the places we wanted to, and just overall, it was a year of more struggle than exciting moments and accomplishments. I decided to share anyway, because some years are like that. Some years are marked by more challenge than fun. It’s all a part of life and all an opportunity to grow.
The unofficial theme of this year seemed to be uncertainty for us. Bassam’s stepfather fell very ill and was given a prognosis of having about a week to live. For months we lived with the thought that any minute we would get the terrible news and Bassam would need to fly out to Lebanon immediately. We couldn’t plan anything or really commit to anything during that time. A few months later, he unfortunately did pass away.
Towards the end of the year, we were affected by the Woolsey Fire in Southern California and were evacuated from our house. For about a week, we had no idea if our home was still standing. We were so lucky that it survived, thanks to a very brave neighbor who stayed behind and put out the fires. We are still evacuated as we deal with the smoke and heat damage repair and aren’t sure when we get to go back home. We still don’t have our clothes and things.
This year was SUPPOSED to be a year full of travel and then beginning to start a family, but it didn’t quite work out that way.
We know this isn’t going to be the most inspiring year end review, but with all of the year end reviews that are full of accomplishment out there, we wanted to publish our mediocre year. If you had a mediocre year too, don’t feel bad! It happens and is part of life. We don’t wish away the good or the bad parts of life, it’s all what makes us who we are.
The important thing is to move on from there and let it make you better. We had a great conversation about the barriers we experienced in 2018 and how to handle them in 2019. We feel like we are going into the new year with a really solid game plan and are excited to see what we are able to make happen this year! Without further adieu, here’s our 2018 recap and our goals for 2019!
2018 Recap
What went well:
We grew a lot in our relationship this year and we are really happy about that! We really struggled in the prior years and finally hit what we feel was rock bottom for us. We are going to be opening up a lot more about this in 2019 and sharing our struggles with you. We knew something had to change and we went hardcore on trying to improve our relationship and our communication. It hasn’t been easy and every single little victory was hard won, but we are in such a better place now than we were at the start of the year. It’s an ongoing process and journey, but we are really happy to see the results of our hard work.
PS. We are launching a 6 week relationship challenge if you want to join us! DETAILS HERE
What didn’t go so well:
We didn’t have very good routines or schedules set up, which is a big reason we didn’t accomplish a lot of our goals. A lot of the year just passed us by without us doing the things we wanted to do because we didn’t schedule them in. We didn’t have a lot of balance in our life with work and personal and we didn’t have the best boundaries with putting ourselves and our relationship before our other relationships. We are in the process of roughly planning out the first half of the year and will plan each month in detail. Then we’ll reevaluate each week to make sure everything is in there and the schedule is realistic. We are scheduling a time for literally EVERYTHING. If we want it to get done, we are scheduling it. I know this will be a game changer for us as it has been in the past when I’ve done it.
Let’s take a walk through the year…
January
I started off the year with great intentions to make this my healthiest year yet. I did Whole30 for the first time and really loved how it went and what I learned. I definitely want to do it again in 2019. You can read more about my Whole30 experience here.
Bassam and I redid our fireplace and it was such a fun experience to take on together! We distressed it and made a wooden panel to go above it. We still need to actually style it though! You can read about our DIY adventure here.
I went on a wellness retreat with my sister for our annual sister’s trip. It was such an incredible experience and really helped change the way I think about emotional wellness. I did my first tarot card reading and it was amazing how much the cards spoke to me. I carry two of them around in my purse.
February
You may know Valentine’s Day is my favorite holiday! We celebrated with a casual picnic of sandwiches at the beach.
We went on a weekend getaway to Paso Robles with another couple and went wine tasting. We visited Daou Winery for the first time and fell in love! We are going back in early 2019 and can’t wait!
March
We used to do weekly Instagram lives and one our favorite lives ever was when Bassam tried to do my makeup! It was hilarious! Then I did his to get back at him for how he made me look, haha. I’m so sad that IG glitched and didn’t let us save it, so maybe we’ll try to redo it sometime in 2019.
April:
This was the month of weekend getaways!
We spent a weekend in Temecula with our family friends. We love the wineries there and wrote about all of our favorite Temecula Wineries.
We also went to San Francisco to meet up with a few other bloggers. I had been chatting online for awhile with a few other bloggers and really connected with them. It was so fun to meet up with them in real life. We instantly clicked and it didn’t feel like we were meeting for the first time. One of my favorite parts of blogging is all the amazing people from all over the world that we’ve met and connected with. It has been so cool to see that we could find people who are very similar to our personality and outlook on life.
Finally, we went on a day trip to Carlsbad to go strawberry picking and see the beautiful flower fields. It was such an amazing day trip! You can read about it here.
May:
This was the first cancelled trip of the year. We were supposed to go to France for our 3 year anniversary, but we had recently received the news of Bassam’s stepfather and had to cancel. We did go on a day trip to meet up with another couple in Santa Barbara and that was a great change of pace from the stress we were going through.
June:
This month was unfortunately marked by a lot of stress and arguing. There is not very much to report, other than it was my birthday and we went to dinner with my family. I love love love celebrating birthdays, and celebrations of all kinds, so I’m hoping we can celebrate it a bit more in 2019. My mom passed away the day after my birthday, so this month also marked the three year anniversary of her passing.
July:
The second cancelled trip. We had an AMAZING trip planned to France to celebrate Bastille Day, Madrid to watch the World Cup games with a sea of Spain fans, and Iceland. We unfortunately had to cancel due to a series of unfortunate events. We tried our best to make up for it by finding French things to do in LA that weekend. We got the news about Bassam’s stepfather just a few days later and Bassam left to Lebanon for a month to say goodbye to his stepfather and support his mother.
August:
While Bassam was gone, I spent a lot of time at the beach, which is my favorite place to be. I went for long walks and spent quality time by myself. I feel it’s important for everyone to be able to enjoy their own company. About a day after Bassam came back, we went on amazing trip to Aruba to work with their tourism board. We renewed our vows on one of the top beaches in the world, which was such a magical and amazing experience. It was a much needed trip after a rough few months.
Bassam’s birthday is in August and I did a choose your own adventure weekend for him. He chose to organize the garage, play with legos, watch TV, relax, and have sushi!
September:
One of our blogger friends came to visit us and we spent the weekend showing them around Venice and Malibu. We love getting to show friends around our city that we love!
October:
One of the highlights of the year for me! We went to the Mojave Desert for the annual lantern festival. It was incredibly magical and one of my favorite bucket list experiences!
We also worked with Buellton this month and got to explore this hidden gem of a town! We absolutely LOVED it and will definitely be back again and again! We can’t believe that we’ve been to the greater area so many times and hadn’t explored Buellton before this! One of our favorite parts of blogging is discovering places that we wouldn’t have otherwise.
November:
The Woolsey Fires sparked in the beginning of the month. We did not expect to be affected at all and only evacuated to humor my dad. Just a few hours later, the fires jumped close to our home and our home went under mandatory evacuation. The fires got extremely close to our house and the bridge to get to our home burned. We didn’t get updates on our house for over week, but eventually we got the news that a neighbor who stayed behind saved our house. It was a really uncertain and challenging thing to go through and not something we ever expected to have happen to us. We had only taken a change of clothes and some of our wedding memorabilia which made it extra challenging to be without our stuff.
Our neighborhood was affected much more than the rest of our town and we couldn’t get back to see our home until several weeks after the rest of our friends and family went back home. When we finally did, we saw how blessed we were for our home to still be standing. The fire had gotten right to the edge of our property; the bushes in our backyard were singed. The park and the road just feet away from us was burned and several homes on our street were completely destroyed. It was such a sad sight to witness and experience. We couldn’t stop saying how lucky we were, but so sad for our neighbors. We were in so much shock.
Even though our home was saved, we still experienced a lot of smoke, heat, and soot damage. We are currently still dealing with the insurance and restoration process and won’t be back home for at least another month or two. Although we are so incredibly grateful for the blessing it is that our home still stands, it’s still been a difficult situation not being able to be in our home for longer than 10 minutes without getting dizzy, not being able to access any of our clothing and belongings, and not knowing when we get to go back home.
December:
The third, and hopefully last, cancelled trip. We had an epic trip planned to Europe to tour the Christmas markets, but due to some health issues our dog, Buddy, was experiencing, we had to cancel. He’s more important to us than any trip, so we knew we were making the right decision by canceling but it was still sad. He’s fortunately doing a lot better now, but still taking a few medications and we have to limit his activity a bit.
We did get the opportunity to go to Biloxi, Mississippi to work with Beau Rivage casino, an MGM property. It was my first time in the south and Bassam’s second time going to Biloxi. We really enjoyed our experience; it was so different than anything we could have expected! Bassam especially loved how friendly everyone was and that they loved his cheesy jokes and would joke along with him.
Looking ahead t0 2019:
We are so excited to welcome in 2019! We have so much planned and we know it’s going to be transformative year to us. In fact, Bassam’s word of the year is transformation.
Here’s what you can expect from us:
- A new blog post every Monday. Most likely we will be blogging more than that, but we wanted to have one day of the week that you could always expect to see new content. We hope you’ll come back here weekly and we hope to provide value to you! Please let us know if there’s anything specific you’d like from us.
- Lots of realness and vulnerability. We’re always very real with you, but we’ve held some things back as Bassam and I each had different comfort levels in getting vulnerable with a public audience. We’ve decided to be really transparent and vulnerable about the struggles we’ve been through and how we’ve dealt with it in the hopes that we can help others who are struggling. We’ll be sharing the majority of our stories and strategies through a new video series that’s coming to the blog every Wednesday starting in March.
- Relationship building exercises throughout the year. We are starting off the year with a 6 week relationship challenge. Each week will address one aspect of a healthy relationship. You can do it live with us if you sign up before Jan 5th or you can do it on your own after that. Sign up here. We’ll also have communication challenges and other things like that coming in the year
- A monthly newsletter with exclusive content. We sent out our first one a few weeks ago and loved chatting with you guys in that capacity. We will be sending a newsletter each month and each one will have different content that’s only for our subscribers. SIGN UP HERE
- More everyday life stuff, especially after we go back home. We want to get back to our intention of starting our account, which was to show that adventure is possible in everyday life, whether it’s by small adventures, such as completing a home DIY, or large adventures like international travel.
- More travel! We are really hoping we won’t have curve balls this year that prevent us from international travel.
Feel free to send us feedback any time and let us know what you’d like from us!
Our 2019 goals:
We created a whole list of goals that specific and measurable and then broke them down into a list of actionable steps that we scheduled in our planners. We started off by just doing the first quarter and then will reevaluate to see how our goals should evolve from there. You can see our new year planning process here. Here’s an overview of what the proposed outcomes look like (not in SMART goal format) and without all the broken down steps.
Both of us:
- Improving health in terms of fitness, diet, flexibility, sleep, and mental well being
- Travel
- Declutter and organize every room of the house
- 2x a month date nights that we alternate planning and 2x a week quality time
- Continue improving our communication
- Take some sort of class together: cooking, dance, or tennis
- Herb garden
Me:
- Increase confidence and self love
- Increase blog traffic and income
- Stick to a content calendar
- Improve recall of the books I read
Bassam:
- Create a routine and increase productivity
- Build accounting business
- Talk to family more frequently and hang out with friends more frequently
- Take up a hobby
Thank you and wish for you
We want to express a deep thank you to YOU! Thank you so much for being here! We sincerely appreciate you showing up on the blog or on Instagram to be part of our journey and allowing us to be part of yours. We love chatting with you SO much and getting to know you guys. When we see that our message of positivity despite challenging situations resonates with people, it makes us so happy and excited. Hearing from you on how we’ve been able to help you in some way, makes all the time we spend working on the blog so so worth it. Thank you for reaching out to us and for interacting with us. You’ll never know how much we appreciate you!
Our wish to you is that your best moment of 2018 will be your worst moment of 2019.
We wish you strength for any difficult things that may come your way.
We wish that you’ll know that you bring your own sunshine no matter what the weather and that you can make anything you want in life happen.
We wish that if a door closes, you’ll look deeper to see if maybe there’s something better out there for you.
We wish you the wisdom to know to enjoy life in the moment and not when you’re looking back at it in the future.
We wish you love, happiness, joy, and the fulfillment of all your dreams, or something that the universe knows is even better for you.
See you in 2019!
xo, Lena & Bassam
My heart aches for you that this was such a difficult year. You two are some of the brightest stars I have met since I started my own blogging journey, and your courage in sharing your struggles and being vulnerable helps us feel like its OK for us to struggle and to be open about our challenges as well. Thank you for your strength and your honesty. I hope that your 2019 is filled with uncancelled trips and joy! And I hope we get to hang out a few timea again too 🙂 sending love your way!
Aw, Lia. Thank you for such a sweet and thoughtful comment! Meeting you and getting to know you as been one of the highlights of my blogging journey. I’m so incredibly glad that our paths crossed. You’re such a huge inspiration to me and such a wonderful person! Can’t wait to see what 2019 has in store for you!