I don’t know how long ago it started, but it all started with eggs and chocolate milk.

One Sunday, I decided to make a big Sunday breakfast. We had eggs, hash browns, bacon, fresh fruit, and chocolate milk. I remember letting Charlotte make the chocolate after she begged and begged, wincing inwardly as she painstakingly poured the milk into a mason jar before mixing in the chocolate. We all sat down to eat together at 9, two hours after we woke up, as we tend be rather slow and lazy on Sundays. They all ate every bite. And then asked for more. And then asked for it again the next weekend. So we did.

Thus, a new tradition was formed. We call it Sunday Breakfast and it is our favorite meal of the week.

I know this may seem like an insignificant event, but to us, especially to me, it was huge. When I left my marriage, I was so worried about the kids. Not so much Charlie, as she was only two, but the boys. They had been there for all the parts; the good, the bad, and the extremely terrible. I felt like I was treading an extremely fine line with our new family set-up. I wanted to start new traditions with them, traditions built out of love and new beginnings, while also making sure they didn’t think I forgot all of our past. Emotionally, I was a wreck almost all of the time.

But that changed with Sunday Breakfast. I could see now that blending the old with the new wasn’t as much a fine line as it was a balancing act. It was OK to incorporate new ideas and new traditions. After all we were a new family and had a newfound hope in finding our happiness in our “new way”. We now have bedtime traditions, summer vacation traditions, different holiday traditions, and even a new December beach week-end tradition. Each one we make together reminds me just how important these changes are.

It reminds me how much I had to fight in order to get to make new traditions in the first place. How much blood, sweat, and tears (so many tears) i shed in order to make this work. Really, that makes all these new traditions we are creating worth more than anything.

And in just a few days, we can enjoy it all over Sunday Breakfast.