2025 Year In Review

Here is my 2025 year in review blog.

So, how did I want to feel in 2025, and did I manage to feel my feelings?

So, when it came to feeling magnetic, I wanted to be magnetic in terms of opportunities and people. I was able to attract more Essential Planner buyers than the previous year, and we have 2 new families in our lives, so I’d like to say we’re attracting the right community around us.

When it came to feeling challenged, I specifically wanted to feel challenged in building an entrepreneurial business with my husband and boy, did that feeling deliver. We’ve been trying to rezone our land for the better part of the year, and are going back and forth with our local township, so needless to say, I’m going to need to choose a more positive word when it comes to this, because this just made things feel hard. I did, however, feel challenged in my workouts and personal growth, so that feeling was had in a good way.

I’m really happy with where I’m at in life. My third core desired feeling was to feel assured. To have this quiet confidence. I definitely felt that way throughout the year!

In 2025, I also wanted to feel nurtured in the way that I took care of myself. From calming the nervous system, to my health, to healing after workouts. I was able to accomplish that for myself and by others after my prolapse surgery in November.

2025 Goals In Review

So as I do every year, I spend time setting goals by life categories. I start by doing a life audit and ranking each category, and then I set goals, starting with the lowest ranking categories in my life. At the beginning of 2025, here was how everything was ranked:

Friendships = 4

Health, Fitness, & Nutrition = 6

Career, Finances, Leisure = 8

Travel, Home, Spiritual, Couple, Family = 9

Based on this audit, I set goals in Friendships first, then Health, Fitness and Nutrition. I used my Health & Fitness smart goals as my push goals, and more things fell into place as I continued to focus on my body health throughout the year.

Friendships

I ranked my friendship category as a 4 last year. I have some amazing friendships in my life, but I’ve experienced heartbreak multiple times in the last little while, so something just feels off in this area of my life.

Here were the goals I had set out for myself this past year:

Book 1 monthly friendship date (with current friends or for meeting new people)
Coordinate monthly potlucks with like-minded women
Join a like-minded female community

I have focused on booking monthly friendship dates with the women in my life who make an effort to stay in my life. Whether it’s a coffee date, dinner date or a walk, these have been life-giving for me. I’m really grateful for the friends who have made an effort to keep our friendships thriving.

I mentioned in my 2025 goals blog that I missed the monthly AIP potluck series I had hosted pre-kids. With our move out to the country this year, I unfortunately let this goal go. However, I saw a really cute idea for a Farmer’s Market party with my girlfriends, where you make one thing and bring enough for everyone to take something home. I got so excited about this idea, so I’m going to attempt to book 1 every other month and see who might be interested in 2026!

I also joined 2 like-minded female communities this year. My friend Lianne’s dinner networking event, and I joined a business membership with other like-minded women that has filled up my cup.

Health & Fitness

In 2025, I continued to want to feel happy looking in the mirror. My journey to lose weight postpartum continued, and also evolved into wanting to go into a prolapse surgery as my strongest self in November 2025.

My fitness smart goals for 2025 were:

4 Workouts a week (2 challenging)
Yoga (once a week)
Ballroom dancing lesson (once a week)

I managed to complete four workouts a week, approximately 90% of the time, even though I had only been working with my personal trainer for a few months at the beginning of the year, before she went on maternity leave. I started practicing yoga on Wednesday morning by watching a YouTube channel video each week to get my body moving again on my mat since I am no longer able to head into a studio in town after moving out to the country. And I managed to train in ballroom dancing once a week up until September, when I had to put on pause due to a really expensive surgery we needed to pay for for our pup, Rogue and my prolapse surgery in November.

And here were my health smart goals for 2025:

Finish the Sexy Autoimmune Academy
Do a parasite cleanse (2x a year)
Do daily pelvic floor strengthening & relaxation before surgery

I didn’t prioritize finishing the course, although I do look through the modules every now and again. This is my sign to finish working through the modules. After doing a parasite cleanse last December that ruined my skin microbiome, I’m hesitant to do another one. I’ll need to research these better before I do another one.

I managed to stay consistent with pelvic floor exercises leading up to my surgery in November.

I also wanted to work on my sleep health and my period health:

Going to bed by 9 – 9:30 pm
Reading from 8:30 – 9:00 pm each night (50% of the time)
Eating raw carrot salads and increasing my magnesium in the back half of my cycle.

Nutrition

I wanted to track my protein intake and aimed for 132g of protein a day.

I tracked it for a few weeks at the beginning of the year and was hitting goals, so I feel good about my overall intake.

I wanted to start cooking more. In the new house, I implemented weekly meal prep again and made all our breakfasts and lunches for the week on Sunday evenings.

Career & Finances

I’m doing extremely well in my full-time job, but wanted to try my hand at being an entrepreneur.

So my husband and I started working on launching a short-term rental business called Wild Escapes on our new property.

I re-launched my Autoimmune Thriving brand and created my signature course called Thrive: Live Well With MS for those newly diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

And I re-launched The Essential Planner for 2026!

My financial goals for 2025 were:

Launch Wild Escapes with minimal debt
Grow investments 6% for the year (this I’ll audit in January)
Follow a monthly budget that includes savings for a dream build

We have yet to launch Wild Escapes due to hoop jumping with our township, but we’ve financially set ourselves up to self-fund the business start through corporate life insurance when the time comes. I consistently tracked our spending this year with our monthly budget template. This allowed us to create a new home garage gym, renovate our kitchen, send Mike to Mexico for stem cell treatments and pay for 2 emergency surgeries for our dog, Rogue as well as her end of life care.

Leisure

I completely forgot I had challenged myself to a new self-reliance and resilience challenge, which didn’t happen. I only realized this when I was re-reading my 2025 goals blog! I have to make sure it’s written down in my Essential Planner, or it won’t get done.

I was able to continue ballroom dancing, including competing for the first time!

AND we were able to get outside for a few deer hunts on our land this year, even if we weren’t successful!

Travel

My value statement when it comes to travel is anchored in wanting to travel 3 times a year. I like the idea of 1 Adventure Trip, 1 Honeymoon Trip and 1 Relaxing Trip per year. Because we moved into a new home this year and are in the process of establishing a new business, travel plans were put on hold this year to free up finances.

1. Adventure Trip: We did manage to travel locally as a family to Toronto for the May long weekend

2. Honeymoon Trip: We took a weekend away at a Cabinscape cabin which doubled as research for our short-term rental business.

3. Relaxing Trip: We ended up sending Mike to Mexico for stem cell treatment, so this was a healthcare trip for him!

Home

We moved in January to our new home in the country. A 5 bedroom, 3 bath house on 160 acress about 45 mins outside of Ottawa. We plan to build a new dream home on our land, but we are also working on establishing a business on the land so until we finish the rezoning process for a commercial tourism business, the new build planning has been put on hold as we have to work through specific steps.

I had shared our renovation list for our current house, and we managed to complete 2 projects this year which included:

Put a Gym Into The Garage
Fully Renovate The Kitchen (we still need to get the backsplash installed so hopefully we can get that done in January of the new year).

Spiritual

My spiritual ranking went from a 6 to a 9 in 2024 and stayed at a nine in 2025 due to my delicious morning routine.

My spiritual SMART goals were:

Daily morning meditation
Daily journaling
Daily devotional & Bible reading

I’ve shared my morning routine before but this is how I fit all three in, with other things.
– Do at least a 10-minute meditation
– Spend 15 mins in quiet with God and my committee
– Journal
– Read my Daily Devotional
– Read my Bible

– Read 1 Chapter in a book

– Make warm lemon water
– Make decaf coffee

I’m still able to stay consistent at least 90% of the year, so I’m really proud of how I feel in my relationship with God and myself.

Couple

For the previous 2 years, I’ve ranked couple as a 9. I am so proud of how we put our relationship first. We used to do weekly date nights, but now that we live out in the country, we’ve shifted that to once-a-month date night, where we just drop our twins off at my parents for a sleepover.

While I’m super proud of how we’ve handled this year, we have definitely become a little less connected due to the frequency of date nights, so there will be some new goals to tackle in 2026 to bring us back together.

Family

When it comes to our immediate family, we’ve grown so much together and life is just so good. In 2024, I had set the following intentions that we’ve continued with.

We spend time every morning as a family connecting
We have dinner together every night and go for a walk as a family and with our dogs after dinner (especially in the summer)
We have a winter & summer bucket list
We spend long weekends up at the family cottage
We go on monthly Mommy/Daughter & Daddy/Son and then Mommy/Son & Daddy/Daughter dates.

To be honest, we struggled with the daily walks. While we have explored our new property, getting out in the winter or the spring with the bugs proved challenging.

Due to financial strain later in the year we put the individual dates on hold so I need to make a list of things we can do with the things that don’t cost anything to stay consistent with them!