We almost lost our triplets in the London Underground a year ago. It was a crazy moment, when we almost lost them, and I’d rather not be thinking about it at all, but I am. I’m thinking about how my husband and I were inside the train, gaping at our shrieking four-year-olds out on the platform as our hands grabbed wildly at luggage and dropped coats and fallen mittens, all with the closure of the train doors imminent. It was one of those incidents that, while quite scary at the moment, grows closer to mind-numbing terror each time I think about what could’ve happened. Read More…
Wow, 2009 flew by, didn’t it? But I have to say, it was certainly kind to my family: seven more adventure-filled months in Europe, a joyful return to our home in San Diego, and thriving almost-five-year-old boys who embrace adventure with both arms. Our year-long stay in Lowestoft, England, was truly a formative experience for our fine young men.
Our time with the Fulbright Teacher Exchange ended in July. We spent our last months savoring England’s special offerings—tromping about the marshes, Read More…
I never used to worry that my three four-year-old sons would be eaten by cows. Apparently, I was living in denial, for those cows in the marshes up the road from us were just biding their time….
On the night before we started our journey back to San Diego from Lowestoft, England, my husband went out to the Dolly’s Dumplings Cache in Carlton Marshes Read More…
I’ve come up with a new reality show concept that should get big ratings—it’s harrowing, it’s unpredictable, it’s graphic. And it’s really simple. Here’s how it goes: You get yourself two grown-ups—parents or non-parents, it doesn’t matter—blindfold them, spin them around really really fast to make them slightly nauseous and maybe give them migraines if you’re lucky, and then you lock them inside a plane with four-year-old triplets and several hundred unsuspecting strangers for eleven hours. Then just point the cameras and see who cracks first.
What inspired this brilliant new idea? The Halversons’ non-stop return flight from London to Los Angeles, that’s what. Read More…
We’re done. Our year in Lowestoft, England, is now spent and in mere hours we’ll board a train for the first leg of our two-day journey back home to San Diego, California, in the good ol’ U.S. of A.
The next few days will probably be one big blur of traveling and recovery from traveling. Our three four-year-olds are now seasoned travelers, though, so I expect that while there will be some small dramas, the overall experience will be pretty okay. In a few days, I’ll let you know how right I was. For now, as we file out the door, I’ll let the boys say our farewell to Lowestoft just as they have to every bus driver after every bus ride since the day we got here:
“Thank you. Bye bye.”
“Thank you. Bye bye.”
“Thank you. Bye bye.”
If I ever doubted it before, I now believe it to my core: travel is about more than adventures and sightseeing. Travel expands our understanding of the world beyond our borders . . . and our understanding of our world back home. Twenty years ago this month—the summer of 1989—I spent twenty-eight days travelling throughout Russia, which was in its last days as the Soviet Union. World events being what they were, my parents still agreed to let their 18-year-old daughter get on a plane bound for the USSR. Now that I’m a mom, I realize how brave they must have been to do that. I imagine the only reason they agreed to let me go was because I’d be with a 30-person youth group sponsored by the U.S. State Department. Still, they get big points for letting me have that adventure. Read More…
Traditions are important. Families have them. Cultures have them. Religions have them. Even science departments have them . . . and that’s what had the Halversons dipping their tootsies in the North Sea one last time yesterday.
Every year, on the second to last day of school, the staff of the science department at my husband’s school here in Lowestoft go for a swim in the North Sea. Our three four-year-olds and I were invited to join them. Now, I don’t know the official temperature of the North Sea where it touched down against Lowestoft’s shores yesterday, but my toes will tell you it was very cold. Yet these teachers donned their swimsuits anyway and plowed through the surf without a care in the world. Two of my sons joined them. My third boy shared his mother’s sense of priorities: digging holes in the sand is a much more pressing endeavor than freezing one’s cockles off. Read More…
Lately I’ve had an additional nightly task: Setting ladybugs free. Well, since we’re in Britain and these are British ladybugs, I should probably call them lady bird beetles. Either way, they are carried into my house daily by the dozens—and it’s all my fault.
When I was in London on July 4th weekend, I wandered through London’s famous Natural History Museum. I stayed only a very short time, however, because it was blazing hot in there. London was having a heat wave, and that stunning architecture turned the museum into a hothouse. At just past ten in the morning, I couldn’t stand it. Rushing toward the exit, I passed through the museum gift shop. Normally, I adore museum gift shops. This time, I went beyond adoration, for the shop was air conditioned. Glory be! I roamed the museum four times longer than I’d roamed the museum itself. My best discovery was the Critter Keeper, a small glass box on a string, meant to be hung around one’s neck. The lid of the box works as a magnifying glass. I bought three Critter Keepers for my three four-year-old sons … and haven’t walked at more than a snail’s pace since. Read More…
So here I was, blogging about my brain’s inability to process the fact that for the past twelve months I’ve been rubbing elbows with thousands of years of civilized history on a daily basis, and I’d totally overlooked a key aspect of living with such extensive history: My feet are stomping all over it.
One of our British friends pointed this out to me yesterday. My blog post about living amongst history resonated with him. He said it captured the kick he gets out of strolling through town and realizing there’s unspeakably ancient stuff just under his feet. The blog post also jogged his memory about something he’d stuffed in a drawer a while back and then completely forgotten: an ancient Roman ring his friend had dug up just a mile from our house here in Lowestoft.
It turns out that long, long ago there was a decent-sized Roman village a mile or so from us and various villa and farm sites in our area. Read More…
In 1962, four Lowestoft, England, tramway enthusiasts rescued the body of an old Lowestoft tramcar, no.14, from its use as a summerhouse in nearby Gunton. From this grew the idea of forming a transport museum that would show the development of mechanical transport for the better part of a century, and thus the East Anglia Tranport Museum was born. By recruiting volunteers, the EATM society transformed a disused meadow in the Carlton Colville region of Lowestoft into a museum with depots, stores, workshops, a diner, roads, tram tracks, overhead wiring for trams and trolleybuses, track for a light railway, and, most importantly, working transports. Read More…
Being from a country that’s only a few hundred years old, I marvel at how modern Englishmen live side-by-side with their history. New model cars speed past buildings created thousands of years before gasoline-powered engines were even imagined, people worship in churches built ages before Europeans landed in North America and then they head home to watch “Britain’s Got Talent” on their plasma TVs, my husband even met a woman who lives in a house build in the 1600s. This kind of elbow-to-elbow living with the past amazes me as much now as it did when we first moved here to Lowestoft, England, almost a year ago. Today, I got a big dose of it as my temporary home town staged an event called “Lowestoft: A Living History.” Read More…
Since the moment I first heard about Lowestoft’s Ness Point, officially the ‘most easterly point in the United Kingdom,’ I’ve been planning to check it out. I’ve been a little foiled, though, as finding the isolated point required traipsing about a more industrial area of Lowestoft without benefit of bus or transport other than our feet. Over the year I’ve asked people about it and been variously told, “Oh, it’s just a short walk from Town Centre” and “Don’t even try to walk those boys that far.” I never had a chance to look around for it by myself, and trust me when I say you don’t just casually decide to wander block by block with three four-year-olds and no real idea where you’re headed. But now, with one week left in our year in Lowestoft, I finally threw caution to the wind (and promised my boys that we would try to find the burned-out remains of that fire we saw a couple of weeks ago) and led my little men eastward. Read More…
Little did I know that my Madonna concert ticket was a 2-for-1. In addition to seeing her Madgesty in London last weekend for the second time, I got to watch the King of Pop, too. Not my normal Fourth of July, this one.
Because the Piccadilly Line of the London Underground would be closed on the Fourth of July, I’d booked a ride on a riverboat down the Thames to get to the O2 Arena, taking me from London Bridge to the O2 pier. Next to me on the boat was an Icon member (Madonna’s fan club) from Scotland who wore a kilt and sported a two-week old Madonna tattoo on his left shoulder. Then, in the arena, my neighbors to my right were a sweet British lady about my age and her father, a retired headmaster who wore a glittery silver cowboy hat the whole time. I swear, I love concerts. The crowd is always as fascinating as the act on stage.
What fell just short of ‘love’ was my seat. Don’t get me wrong, I liked it very much, as it gave me an unobstructed and close view of Madonna, something I didn’t have for that first concert in Wembley last November. I really, really liked that view…I was just terrified of dying because of it, that’s all. Read More…
Little did I know when I planned my Mommy Only weekend in London for the Madonna concert that London’s entire Soho area would be blocked off for a “London Pride Festival” that included a long parade down Regent Street. In my ignorance, I’d used a map of London, a map of the Underground, and my watch to plan out my day: The world famous natural history museum, a quick stop at the London Transport Museum shop to buy buses that would entertain my triplet sons on our 13-hour flight back to the States in two weeks, followed by a stop at the Hamley’s toy store for Matchbox tractors, then down into the Underground for a zip-over to Shakespeare’s Globe on the other side of the Thames River in time to nab one of the 700 £5 standing-only tickets available for the 2pm matinee performance of “As You Like It.” If all went well, I might even slip in a visit to the WWII Churchill Museum. It would be a full day the likes of which would never happen had I brought my preschool triplets. The problem was, I didn’t think to consult the morning paper, too. Had I done that, I would’ve known that my weekend in London coincided with London Pride celebrations. And I definitely wouldn’t have walked myself right into a red barricade and nearly flipped over it headfirst into a gay pride parade. Read More…
It’s not every year you get to celebrate the Fourth of July in the Mother Country. I, personally, will be celebrating it at the 02 Arena in London with Madonna and a few thousand of her friends. My sons and husband will be celebrating it here in Lowestoft, on the easterliest tip of England, without me.
Realizing we’d be several hours apart on the big day, last Friday I suggested to my three sons that we throw a traditional Fourth of July BBQ two days early, on the Second of July. Being four-year-olds, they are completely oblivious of dates and couldn’t care less what any of the words coming out of my mouth meant besides “party.” “Apple pie” and “ice cream” struck a chord with them, though. Of course they wanted a party with apple pie and ice cream. What kind of an idiot would even have to ask?
Apparently, the same kind of idiot who plans a BBQ without actually owning a barbeque, and who buys two cans of hot dogs (yes, cans, because as the ASDA employee explained to me, British people just don’t ‘do’ hot dogs like American people do) without owning a can opener. Yes, this was going to be a celebration like none other. Read More…