We just learned that the “travel bug” we originally left in Lowestoft, England, has reached Tirol, Austria. Tirol is a region in the heart of the Alps that boasts mighty peaks, crystal clear lakes, picturesque towns, and, now, a little yellow taxi. 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…
I think about Jose every day. Many times every day, in fact. Jose* is a four-year-old we met in the Lisbon airport as we waited to board our plane for Madrid. He and my three four-year-olds spoke entirely different languages, but they didn’t need words to bond. They had cars. He had one in each hand, and our boys had backpacks full of them, and thus a friendship was struck up. Jose sat in front of us on the plane. Again, no words were needed—the boys passed a pad of paper back and forth, taking turns drawing pictures for each other. We have one of those pictures, drawn and autographed by Jose, on the art wall in our Lowestoft kitchen. Read More…
The Halversons’ seven-day half term STAYcation in their temporary home town of Lowestoft, England, comes to an end.
I gotta start playing the lottery. I don’t know any other way to rake in a fortune fast to let my husband stay home with us all the time, staring now. The boys simply adore the time they spend with their daddy. We’re spoiled, though, with him being a teacher and getting all those school vacations. Last week was our last ‘term break’ in England, and we did so much in such a short time—but the best part was that we did it all with Daddy.
The boys were so proud to take their dad to the Children’s Center so that he could see where they spend several days each week. Read More…
The Halverson’s seven-day ‘half term’ STAYcation in their temporary home town of Lowestoft, England, continues…
While I must admit there have been times when I’ve considered, in darkest recesses of my exhausted mind, feeding my three spirited sons to the tigers, I haven’t actually done so, despite this photographic suggestion to the contrary. This photo was taken inside Norwich Castle, a castle and keep built by the Normans as a Royal Palace 900 years ago on the orders of William the Conqueror. It once served as a gaol and is now a museum that features not only castle-related exhibits but natural history exhibits as well. Like this taxidermied tiger that scared the bejesus out of my sons Read More…
The Halverson’s seven-day half term STAYcation in their temporary home town of Lowestoft, England, continues…
Carlton Marshes, situated at the southern tip of the Norfolk & Suffolk Broads, is comprised of more than one hundred acres of beautiful Suffolk grazing marsh, fens, and peat pools and is crisscrossed by a myriad of waymarked trails. Luckily for us Halversons, this acres are but a stone’s throw away from our Lowestoft house. And even luckier, they’re full of TREASURE!
A few days ago, a friend suggested that our family try out geocaching, as he knew of a fun cache located in Carlton Marshes and he knew of our interest in hiking. He got my attention right quick. I’ve long harbored an interest in geocaching, seeing it as yet another way to get my triplet boys to love hiking, and so I jumped at the chance—and at his hand, which was holding a free GPS unit already pre-programmed with the cache’s coordinates. We were definitely game for geocaching. Read More…
Day #3 of the Halverson’s seven-day half term STAYcation in their temporary home town of Lowestoft, England.
We saw high speeds on and off the water today at Oulton Broad’s motor boat racing championship. The biggest action happened on the water, of course, where hydroplanes, catamarans, and monohulls zipped past us at full roar. Usually these motor boats race on Thursday nights and we hear their engines a mile away as we put the boys to bed. But with today being a British ‘bank holiday’, the motor boats lined up at noon for heat after heat of high speed racing. I think I heard the announcer say 120 miles per hour at one point. That’s definitely faster than the first boat race we saw at Oulton Broad last November, Read More…
Day #1 of the Halverson’s seven-day half term STAYcation in their temporary home town of Lowestoft, England.
If you don’t go anywhere, you’ll never see anything new. That’s what my husband tells our four-year-old sons whenever we head out on a hike or even just a walk around the neighborhood, and I’ve decided to make it the family mantra after this year of living abroad. Whether we’re doing Big Travels during a school break or looking for local adventure on a weekday, we spend most days going somewhere, seeing something new. Why, I can remember one day when just walking to the bus stop scored me and the boys half an hour of landscaping work with a family that was renovating their house and lawn. We’d simply struck up a conversation with the lady of the house about her husband and sons’ sweeping techniques and before we knew it, the broom and hoses were in the boys’ hands, water and rocks flying in every direction. New places, new things, that’s what we’re about.
Now, with two months left in our year of living in Lowestoft, England, yet another one-week school break is upon us. Read More…
Lyon, France, was city #4 on the Halverson’s sixteen-day spring vacation, which also included stays in Lisbon, Portugal; Madrid, Spain; Barcelona, Spain; and London, England.
The French are known for their art. The Halverson Boys are known for stopping to look at colorful things. Tulips, dandelions, nasturtium, creatures with bulgy yellow eyes and long zebra-stripped necks made of glass… if it’s bright and pretty, it captures my sons’ attention.
The bulgy-eyed creature made of glass stopped them in their tracks outside the Galerie Nuances et Lumiere in Lyon, the fourth and last city of our spring vacation. A creation of Portuguese artist of glass Fernando Agostinho, this whimsical fellow was surrounded by a host of other happy creatures and, even more appealing to my small men, by countless buses and cars. Read More…
Barcelona, Spain, was city #3 on the Halverson’s sixteen-day spring vacation, which also included stays in Lisbon, Portugal; Madrid, Spain; Lyon, France; and London, England.
Eight months in England has damaged me severely—I’ve forgotten how to go to the beach. Yes, Lowestoft is a ‘beach town,’ but not ‘beach’ in the sense that I grew up with. In San Diego, you put on a swimsuit with maybe a t-shirt and shorts over it for the journey down the sand to the surf. Flip-flops or no shoes at all, sun tan lotion, beach towels, digging toys for small children. In Lowestoft, England’s easterliest point and perched on the North Sea, you trek through the sand in parkas that cover long sleeves, jeans, and long johns. Snow boots and gloves, ski caps and digging toys for small children. Since first arriving in Lowestoft in August, we’ve had just one day warm enough for swimsuits at the North Sea’s edge, but that’s it. We soooo missed San Diego’s warmth that we deliberately planned this Spring Break’s vacation with warm locales in mind. What we got was indeed weather balmy enough for shorts, but it was interspersed with rain and snow. Read More…
A special project on the Halveron’s sixteen-day spring vacation, which included stays in Lisbon, Portugal; Madrid, Spain; Barcelona, Spain; Lyon, France; and London, England.
Have you seen Oliver Woodman? You’d know if you had—he’s made of wood! Back in 2003, when I worked as a children’s book editor for Harcourt Children’s Books in San Diego (a full two years before my triplets were born and I went freelance), I had the pleasure of working on Darcy Pattison’s clever picture book The Journey of Oliver K. Woodman. I was only an assistant on that book, I’m afraid. I wouldn’t get my chance to be the lead editor on an Oliver book until it’s sequel, The Search for Oliver K. Woodman, starring a woman made of wood (of course!). But I invested myself in Oliver’s story in a very unique way right from the beginning—my husband 
and I built three life-sized, hinged Olivers, who traveled around the United States on a publicity tour to bookstores, schools, and libraries. On that tour, Read More…
Madrid, Spain, was city #2 on the Halverson’s sixteen-day spring vacation, which also included stays in Lisbon, Portugal; Barcelona, Spain; Lyon, France; and London, England.
Thank goodness I didn’t know about the swine flu three weeks ago, when we started our 16-day trip with three sick four-year-olds. Today the U.S. declared a national state of emergency for a flu that is claiming lives around the globe at an astounding rate. The symptoms of the swine flu, according to a cnn.com article, are fever, cough, sore throat, body aches, headache, chills, fatigue, loss of appetite, diarrhea, and vomiting. Hello! You couldn’t describe my sick boys any more explicitly. Had I known! Read More…
Madrid, Spain, was city #2 on the Halverson’s sixteen-day spring vacation, which also included stays in Lisbon, Portugal; Barcelona, Spain; Lyon, France; and London, England.
You can stuff your Survival Backpack with all the treats in the world and pack it with new toys until you stumble under its tonnage, but the true secret to traveling on planes with three four-year-olds is in knowing your football. That is, knowing how to read the defense and when to call an audible.
Take our plane ride from Lisbon, Portugal, to Madrid, Spain. Read More…
Lisbon, Portugal, was city #1 on the Halverson’s sixteen-day spring vacation, which also included stays in Madrid, Spain; Barcelona, Spain; Lyon, France; and London, England.
So here’s the thing: It is impossible for two adults to carry three four-year-olds at the same time. It is equally impossible to explain to three four-year-olds that two adults cannot carry them at the same time. Yet my husband and I tried to do both during our three-day stay in Lisbon, Portugal, with our sick triplets sons, to mixed results. But what else were we to do? This would be the only way to see the city, as the boys were too weak to walk. Several days of stomach upset had cleaned them out and killed their appetites. We were forced to trade off boys every few blocks, sometimes putting a child on top of a backpack to relieve our aching arms, but always leaving at least one boy to hoof it on his own two feet for a stretch—and to whine continuously about it. It’s not like we could ask my mother-in-law to lug a heavy child about town, right? But no worries, we had a plan: Read More…
Lisbon, Portugal, was city #1 on the Halverson’s sixteen-day spring vacation, which also included stays in Madrid, Spain; Barcelona, Spain; Lyon, France; and London, England.
It’s amazing, the raw power with which a small boy’s stomach can eject contents that displease it. And three boys’ tummies erupting in unison, well, it staggers the mind to just contemplate that. Sadly, we lived it in the days leading up to our trip thanks, most likely, to an ill-considered pre-trip feast of cockles, winkles, welks, and crab sandwiches. Or maybe it was the penguin egg.
Regardless of the cause, though, we faced a dilemma: When the day arrived for us to board our train to London, we still had two four-year-old thrower-uppers. Was it right to put them through two days of travel to reach Lisbon, city #1 on the trip? But what was the alternative, to skip the entire fully-booked and greatly anticipated 16-day trip because of a few hard first days? We couldn’t easily chop those first few days from the trip because our flights all connected city-to-city—to get to Barcelona, we had to be in Madrid, and son on; we’d lose a lot of money in buying new plane tickets and not using old ones. What would you do?
We decided to go . . . with our pockets bulging with plastic freezer bags and our backpacks filled with spare clothes. Read More…