Lately, however, some changes in the podcast industry have nudged me to try to shake things up. So I’m excited to announce that, starting today, Before Breakfast will feature one longer episode per week. These episodes will likely run on Wednesdays, and will usually feature an interview with a fascinating person sharing advice on how they take their days from great to awesome and how we can too.

I’m launching the series with none other than Sarah Hart-Unger! Not only is she very productive, she has lots of great tips. And, I’m pretty used to talking with her, which I figured would make me less nervous for producing this thing.

So if you’d like to hear her morning routine and life hacks, go check out today’s episode. And please consider subscribing to Before Breakfast. Each week features four new short episodes, plus the interview, and then on the weekend I rerun “classic” episodes from the past 5.5 years. We call those “Second Cup.” You know, morning coffee themed…

While I’m shaking things up…I also decided to add a video component to the Vanderhacks newsletter. Starting next Tuesday, I’ll do one video post a week, sharing a quick tip. You can go here to subscribe.

Thanks for reading, listening to, and watching my work! I really appreciate it.

And while you’re here, how about a September-themed sonnet, called “Remembering”…?

September blue is different, brighter, thin,
the sky a hue that August can’t quite match,
the trees aglow as light begins to bend.
A wisp of wind blows stronger, tries to catch

a twirling leaf, the first of many — scouts
the landscape, finds a spot on cooling ground.
I find myself nostalgic, hereabouts,
recall Septembers past, those days first bound

by early night, by waning heat, by gold
on sidewalks — I once walked these pathways, new.
I watched the city brace itself for cold,
I pondered dreams that only I then knew.

What can I catch? A leaf, a hope, I may —
but others, just like autumn, drift away.

Photo: Believe it or not, this was one of the promotional images I snapped for Before Breakfast back when it launched in 2019…

As the calendar turned to March, it has me thinking about March a year ago. I have been on and off with journal writing over the past three decades (yes, starting at age 12), but I wrote fairly regularly during Kid #5’s first few months as I was trying to remember things. And so I recorded the details of his sleeping (those weeks when it seemed to be getting better from the newborn days!) and then the news turning so dark. It was about a year ago that we had our last normal weekends and weeks with kid activities. There was a middle school musical. Early morning school choir rehearsals. Prepping to get the baby’s passport (which, surprise, we’ve never used…). I sang a concert of very challenging French music with my choir. My husband and I went out to eat at a Mexican restaurant, not knowing we would not eat out again for many months.

As things started getting canceled, as borders and schools closed, as lockdowns went into effect, I wrote in my journal about all this. I have been re-reading these entries now. I mentioned that I was sorry I had read Station Eleven recently. I thought, judging by whatever statistics China was reporting, that the disease itself would be less scary for younger people than the potential breakdown in civil society (which is what happened in Station Eleven…though the Georgia Flu was also 90 percent fatal, so there’s that). Would the grocery supply chain hold up? I wrote of my elation when my husband managed to shop at Wegmans and actually get a lot of the things we needed. Our nanny had previously stockpiled a lot of canned beans and vegetables in our pantry.

A year later, we still have that supply of canned beans and vegetables. I wrote that all of this had to end at some point. We had to emerge on the other side. I had travel plans in April and May, but surely this would all be over by then, right? I didn’t know that the grocery supplies would hold up pretty well, always offering up food that was more palatable than those canned green beans, which is why we never ate them, but a year later my older kids still wouldn’t be back in school full time. As millions of jobs disappeared, I wrote how thankful I was that we could both work from home. I didn’t know that a year later I’d still be eating lunch on many weekdays with my husband, who would convert the guest room into his full-time office.

One of the upsides of a journal is that you write down details that don’t necessarily make it into the history books. For instance, the second week of March was absolutely gorgeous. Spring really accelerated out of February last year, and the temperatures here were in the 70s. That pushed all the buds to blossom. So I wrote of sitting on the porch, holding or nursing the baby, soaking up the flowers, and reading headlines about the world falling apart. It was a strange juxtaposition. At least the kids could play outside all day when the schools closed and no one had yet figured out how distance learning would work. I wrote about my homeschool schedules (remember those?)

A year ago, I wrote in my journal that “my goal is for the kids to look back and think this was an adventure.” I am not sure if they’d feel this way, though I don’t think they’ve had too terrible a time of it. Certainly, we’ve been so much more fortunate than many. We’re all healthy, so far at least. They can play with each other. They’ve enjoyed spending more time with their father, almost to the point of ridiculousness. The other night my husband had to do a video call that absolutely, positively could not be interrupted, so he left the house to do it, and as I was putting everyone to bed, child after child said “wait, where’s Daddy?” They were flummoxed by his disappearance, I guess not remembering that on an average Tuesday a year ago, this would have been normal.

Some things are returning to normal. My mother-in-law is vaccinated. My parents have an appointment for their second vaccine. The baby was supposed to be baptized on March 15, 2020, and this was canceled. It is now rescheduled for an outdoor ceremony in late March. His little white baby baptism outfit doesn’t fit, but he’ll wear something else than he would have a year ago and it will happen, just on a very different timeline than I suspected as I wrote, last March, of those weeks where everything changed.

Photo: Longwood Gardens luminaries 

But at some point in the last year I realized that my chronic sore throats and congestion were making me miserable. I did some research and found that dairy was a potential culprit (red wine too, but I’d already mostly given that up). So I decided to try cutting it out to see what would happen.

The answer is that while the problem is not 100 percent gone, I’d say it’s 75 percent gone (there may be other triggers) and that’s a big improvement. Of course, this means I’m now facing down life without cheese, or at least with very limited cheese. I have needed to change some fairly strongly ingrained habits. Like, I had milk or cream in my coffee every day since I started drinking coffee at age 15.

Changing a 27-year daily habit sounded like it would be…hard. So I’m shocked by how not hard it is has been. True, there are a great many dairy alternatives, but I decided I would try to learn to drink my coffee black. We get really good coffee grounds, make it strong, and now, a few months later, I am not even tempted to use the soy-milk creamer my husband bought. As for ice cream, I guess I have been motivated enough by the fact that I am feeling better to mostly stay away from it. We have several pints of Ben and Jerry’s sitting in the freezer untouched (my kids don’t like ice cream with stuff in it, which is why no one else is eating those). Bread fresh out of the bread maker turns out to be pretty good even without butter.

That just leaves hard situations like family make-your-own pizza night. The current solution is that my husband and I make our pizza with just a tiny bit of cheese on one half. That doesn’t seem to trigger anything too bad.

In any case, I’ve been pondering what I can learn from this in terms of habit change. One is that motivations matter. Avoiding physical pain is a really, really strong motivator. Another is that even a daily habit (like cream in my coffee) might be less ingrained than one might imagine. There are habits that are deep grooves and then there are ones we do just because we do. I have failed in my attempts to check email and Instagram less frequently. Cream turned out to be just something I did early on and then never re-examined.

Support helps. My husband often makes scrambled eggs for breakfast and he just stopped making them with cheese, or would split the pan in half. Plus we’re not in social situations right now where any of this would become an issue. It helps me to remember that this is a choice. If I’m at a dinner party in the future where everyone is eating cheese or ice cream, I can eat these things…I’ll just deal with the consequences.

And then the longer you do something the easier it becomes. Now that I know I can drink my coffee black I’ve decided against putting any non-dairy creamers in it. It’s simpler not to, so no need to start that back up again.

Have you ever changed a long-term habit?