There were some cool highlights. Among them:

— A new book deal! I wound up switching agents and publishers over the last year or so, but in April we announced a 2-book deal with Norton. Big Time (current title) will come out in early 2026, and The Golden Hours will come out in 2027. I love writing (and writing long) so I have been reminding myself how grateful I am to have the opportunity to create more books.

— In a totally non-commercial vein: I wrote a handful of sonnets I like. I continued my year-long project of writing two lines a day, thus producing one sonnet a week. Most are eh. Some I like. I’ll likely do a post of my favorite sonnets from 2024 over the next week or two.

— I didn’t really have a banner reading year but I read a lot about my current obsession: the ancient earth. This started with my obsession with non-homo sapiens human species, but then has extended back. My current interest: the end-Permian extinction (when 90 percent of all life died out), and then the Triassic, which was when the earth recovered and life re-evolved. At one point it rained for a million years. I am also obsessed with the Economist’s annual Holiday issue (I tend to read it over the holiday break), and they actually had an article on the Triassic this time around. Bliss!

— Spain with my big boys. This was a trip with a lot of memories, from a horse-drawn carriage ride in Seville (smelling the oranges the whole time!) to a little paella restaurant in Rondo, to bike riding in Madrid. While the weather wasn’t wonderful, we survived that and the upgraded seats home were just the cherry on top ending to a great adventure.

— Paris with my daughter. A college friend suggested we go see Taylor Swift in Paris, so we did. Taylor was exciting but it was also fun to see art, eat crepes, cruise on the Seine, and enjoy gorgeous spring weather. She and I had fun at the Olivia Rodrigo concert over the summer as well. I took my 17-year-old to NYC for a long weekend and enjoyed that, particularly our sunset boat cruise and seeing MJ the Musical.

— Fall leaves. I went to Maine twice this fall and really enjoyed the scenery — including seeing the Northern Lights in Portland.

— Singing in the B-Minor Mass. This has been on my List of 100 Dreams for years, and this year it finally happened. I listened to all of Bach this year as well, and so getting to learn this piece even better was a fitting capstone to the project. My church choir sang Brahms’ Requiem, which was also cool.

— I hosted a “progressive” dinner party in the spring where we moved to different places for different courses.

— I ate at my favorite Mexican restaurant many times.

— I went to many botanical gardens. I met friends in NYC and went to the NY Botanical Garden in April for their orchid show. Then I went to Phoenix on a speaking trip and got to see the desert landscape in their garden — totally different, but amazing as well. I went to Longwood many times, and also to Chanticleer, which can be done in a lunch time trip in spring/summer and is usually gorgeous.

There were some lowlights as well:

— Excruciating back and nerve pain. About a year ago I suffered a back incident (with corresponding nerve pain down my leg) that left me unable to walk for a week and then unable to do basic things like empty the dishwasher for a while. My life doesn’t stop, so this meant I took a family trip to Disney five weeks after that happened. That was…hard. Recovery has been fitful though I do feel significantly better now. I wish I knew why. I was doing all the “right” back exercises/physical therapy exercises before the episode, so it’s not like they prevented it.

— Some family travel. The 5-year-old has trouble getting to sleep at home and on the road it is even worse. So Disney (February) and Barbados (over Christmas) both featured some very late nights with a child throwing a tantrum. Not cool. Especially when you’re paying through the nose for the privilege! Bedtime battles in general are just tedious. I do know that “this too shall pass,” as my older kids don’t throw tantrums at 10 p.m., but this is a parenting stage I wish would go a little faster.

— Norovirus. Enough said.

— Child behavioral challenges. Will just have to vague-blog here.

— Not making it to Scotland. Longtime readers may recall our canceled flights, driving home from Newark at 3 a.m., etc. Good times. However, there is always the Bronx Zoo!

In other news: I had several longer Before Breakfast episodes run since I last posted links. On December 18 I welcomed Gretchen Rubin to the show, and she talked about habits, happiness, and more. On December 25 longtime listener Amanda shared her morning routines and her “pre-planning” rituals. On January 1st I did a solo longer episode in which I talked about time tracking — why and how to do it.

Please give them a listen!

Also, please consider signing up for my annual Time Tracking Challenge. From January 13-20 a great many of us will be tracking our time together. I’ll post my time logs on this blog. You can sign up here to get daily motivational emails from me.

Photo: Spain!

I did not mean to take two weeks off from the blog, but life happens. At the beginning of this stretch, the preschooler got a nasty stomach bug, so I was up much of the night with him. Then our nanny got it, so we were sans childcare. Not my most productive week!

And then of course it was Christmas. We hosted my extended family for a party a few days before. On another day, all 7 of us went into NYC to see the Rockettes and go out to dinner. Activities like this remind me that my family is…bigger than average. When we parked the minivan at the garage we’d booked and all climbed out, it had a real clown car feel. It was a fun trip, but it was also 17 degrees that day, and so every time we were outside someone got massively unhappy.

We did the Christmas pageant (this year we had a reader and a sheep) and the service of lessons and carols on Christmas Eve. Christmas itself was low key in the morning but then the afternoon was a flurry of packing because at 5:45 a.m. on December 26th we drove to Newark Airport to fly to Barbados! International travel is another thing that is challenging with 7 people. But we made it. We spent time in the pool, on the beach, with my husband’s brother’s family (they went to the same resort) and just generally relaxing. Also, we celebrated someone’s 5th birthday! Yes, the little guy turned 5. For the first time since 2007, I do not have a child under the age of 5. Crazy.

I will give a shout out to my husband here, because I arranged to fly home from Barbados on 12/29, leaving him to travel solo with five kids the next day. Why? Because I had a dress rehearsal in Philly on 12/30 for a performance of the Bach B-Minor Mass!

Yep, this item has been on my List of 100 Dreams for ages. If you read 168 Hours, it’s in there. In college, I learned the mass, but then I was going abroad to study in Australia, and so I missed the concert. I figured I’d have another chance. Then 25 years passed. I started to realize that a bucket list item like this was going to be challenging because while you can buy a plane ticket somewhere exotic if you wish to go, it is a lot harder to arrange for an orchestra, a chorus, a director, a performance venue, etc. My back pocket idea was to audition for a choir an hour north of here that performs the mass every spring.

But I got a hot tip that Choral Arts Philadelphia would be performing the B-Minor mass on New Year’s Eve, and the director was kind enough to let me join them. I started going to rehearsals on Monday nights downtown, and re-learning the music. Yesterday, I sang in the performance and finally crossed this off my list. It was really cool. The singing sounded amazing and I was just trying to be as present as possible to appreciate it all. I hope it won’t be another 25 years (any other Philly area choirs doing this work, let me know!) but I know now to appreciate the opportunity.

(Also cool: a member of the orchestra introduced herself to me before the concert and said she had read my books! How fun is that?)

Then I drove up to my neighborhood to meet my younger two kids at a New Year’s Eve party (our nanny worked during the day and took them to the start of it). We did a New Year’s countdown at 7:30 p.m. The kids danced and waved glow sticks. Just perfect. Then my husband and I came home to supervise a houseful of teenagers, because some of the older kids decided to have sleepovers. There are 5 extra young people in my house right now but everyone is still asleep and they have all been very good.

So that was how I rang in the new year. This hasn’t been the easiest year, but I love the way it ended — with music, family and friends. Here’s to a great 2025!

Of course, as we hit the last 100 days of the year, this means I’m nearing completion of this year-long project. Which leads to the question…what should I do next?

In 2021, I read War and Peace at the rate of one chapter a day. In 2022 I read all the works of Shakespeare (at a pace of about 3-4 pages with small type per day). In 2023 I read all the works of Jane Austen (at a pace of about 10 pages per day – I finished in September since it turned out I miscalculated on this one). And this past year I’ve been listening to approximately 30 minutes of Bach daily.

Whatever I choose for 2025 needs to fit a few criteria:

*It needs to be worth doing (as I believe all the previous projects have been!). I want to read or listen to work that is generally seen as classic and important.

*I need to be excited about it (I’m just not that into Mozart…sorry!).

*It also needs to be doable. Some people’s lifetime works might actually take more than a year to consume at a sustainable pace. I can probably read for about 20 minutes a day. Listening is a little easier to do more since I can have it running in the background (like in the car). Obviously there is some ambiguity here as I could have listened to performances of Shakespeare’s plays but…anyway.

So, I welcome suggestions! You can post or can always email me (laura at lauravanderkam dot com). My timeline for a decision is the Best Laid Plans Live retreat in early November, as I try to have a rough draft of next year’s goals by then…

In other news: We celebrated my 2nd kid’s birthday this week! He turned 15. After he finished a 5k in a cross country meet, we had his favorite foods for dinner, which included lobster tails, a caprese salad, and mac and cheese. He asked what time exactly he was born, and it turns out it was 10:07 p.m. (per the birth certificate). That reminded me that the same doctor delivered him and his older brother. After kid #2 was born, she congratulated me and told me “I’m so happy I could help you complete your family.” Haha. Of course, this was in NYC where the maternity ward was so crowded (we were 9 months after Christmas…) that the baby and I wound up staying in a room in the urology ward where they posted a guard in front of the door (as there was no other security, as there is in the mother/baby unit). It was like we were famous. Memories! It’s been fun watching him become a runner. He’s definitely faster than his mom.

This year I am aiming to listen to all the works of Bach. By doing a little bit every single day it’s never overwhelming.

Now, into August, it’s kind of amazing how much music I’ve listened to! For instance, I have listened to all 200+ cantatas Bach wrote. I listened to one a day, and we’re 200+ days into the year, so there we go. I also listened to all of his organ works. Many of these were quite short, but still, hundreds of pieces. That took us from BWV 525 to BWV 771.

August is going to be a fantastic listening month. Bach’s famous masses and oratorios are all coming up. My calendar has me starting the B-Minor mass tomorrow. Of course I’ve listened to this work dozens of times, but it will be cool to do in the context of listening to everything else. I have heard snippets of the B-Minor mass in lots of the cantatas that Bach wrote before it. Just because of the way I structured this listening I’ll also have the Goldberg Variations coming up this month, right after the St. Matthew Passion.

I’m still writing a sonnet a week too. This pace of two lines a day feels quite doable. Here’s a sentimental little one I wrote called “Peaches.” We didn’t wind up picking peaches this year, but oh well…

Remember, now, the walk into the field?
A basket in the hand, the blazing sun…
The orchard waits — what have the trees concealed?
I peer into the branches, first see one

and then another: peaches, plump and ripe.
We twist the stems, so many, stacking high,
as through the leaves the sunshine, in a stripe,
illumines all this flesh. A butterfly

drinks deeply, and we taste this sugar too,
on peaches, and each others’ lips. A while
will pass — and in the grocery store a few
new peaches, stacked, will conjure up a smile.

Remember now, the shade of summers past?
A kiss, that in the taste of peach, can last…