‘Tis the time of year to party, and we Halversons have done our share of partying. Thanks to the Children’s Centers in our temporary town of Lowestoft, England, the boys had a gala Christmas shindig complete with cookies slathered in icing and almost obliterated by sprinkles (cookies that the boys themselves decorated, actually), an odd little game called “Pass the Parcel” (that took forever, testing the patience of every 0 to 4-year-old in the room . . . and there were dozens of ‘em), and a photo op with Father Christmas.
But even better than this banner event was The First Annual Take Your Favorite Bus Driver to Tea Day, Read More…
People love to traumatize their children early in life by placing them on the knee of a loud man in bright clothing with a fluffy white face who then barks “Ho! Ho! Ho!” in their faces and completely freaks them out. Maybe it’s year-end payback for the behavior that would earn most kids coal, payback eeked out just before the gifts go under the tree as reward for all the good behavior. Regardless of the reason, it’s part of the ritual. Read More…
Want to know EXACTLY when Santa will land on your roof this year? My kids certainly do. And thanks to my sister telling me about the North American Aerospace Defence Command’s high tech radar tracking system, we will know. And you can, too. Here’s the link: www.noradsanta.org.
For more than 50 years, NORAD and its predecessor, the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) have tracked Santa’s Christmas Eve flight. The tradition began in 1955 after a Sears Roebuck & Co. ad for children to call Santa misprinted the telephone number. Instead of reaching Santa, the phone number put kids through to the CONAD Commander-in-Chief’s operations “hotline.” Read More…
Mucky Ducks is the Brit’s way of saying “messy play.” They’re not exaggerating. When we report to the Mucky Ducks sessions at our local children’s centers, I bring a full set of spare clothes for each boy, including socks and underwear. They get filthy.
At first it was paint. Paint on their shirts, paint on their pants, paint on their faces, paint in their hair. Then it was suds, and glitter-filled water, and shaving cream, and paste. Now its mud. Read More…
I recently came home from an afternoon of editing to discover that one of my sons had performed eye surgery on a Dalmation, that another son had executed a difficult pus extraction procedure on a fluffy blue canine of unknown breed, and that my last boy had sedated a lion with a “reawwy biiiig” dose of anesthetic. Life with almost-four-year-old triplet boys is full of surprises.
And the surprises have been getting more, uh, interesting, now that Grandma S. has joined us in Lowestoft, England, for a six-month stay. Adding her to the daily mix has added a whole new dimension to this family. Read More…
A few Thanksgivings before my boys were born, my mom got new carpeting in her dining room. It was white. Having spent a quarter of a century raising four daughters who didn’t understand the words “Take off your muddy shoes before you come in!”, she proactively warned my sisters and I that if we so much as breathed on the new carpet when we visited, she could not be held responsible for her actions.
Then she promptly dropped a piece of pie on the carpet. Read More…
Heaven help the human who stands in my way when I get a bee in my bonnet. About a month into our one-year stay in Lowestoft, England, I looked around our temporary house and decided it did not feel like a home. Blank walls, sparse furnishings . . . Anyone could be living there. It had no personality, no sense of the family now living within. We need to make this ours, I thought. Later that day I learned of the existence of BluTack, and I was off! Read More…
Here’s news for you: Stomach cramps, diarrhea, triplets, and Christmas lights don’t mix. Add in a once-hourly bus and freezing temperatures, and you’ve got one wild Friday night on your hands.
In the interest of doing as many local things as we can, the Halversons decided to go to Southwold, a town about 40 minutes south of Lowestoft, for the town’s annual Christmas Tree lighting. Anyone who’s been reading this blog since we moved to England knows Read More…
With a title like this, and a family that includes three three-year-old boys, this blog post could go just about anywhere. Luckily, it is going to a fun place—a playplace, to be precise.
Located in the East Pavillion just steps away from Lowestoft’s award-winning beaches, “Mayhem” is an indoor playplace that dwarfs any similar attraction I’ve ever encountered. There are three or four levels to it—I couldn’t really 
count, given its mazelike design—and the colors and webbed walls make the whole thing hard to take in at a glance. Even more difficult is maneuvering the thing, with is gloriously physically-challenging holes and rollers and padded climbing platforms. At the end of the boys’ hour of play in Mayhem, they were laying on the colored 
balls, too pooped to do more than swish their arms and legs as if making snow angels. Read More…
Last night I received the following email from my mom…
Deb
I got your emails while we were at the Wild Animal Park. Temp is in the 70’s and Santa was in his house surrounded by animals and dripping sweat. Even the Meerkats were laying prone on their backs taking in the sun, all they needed was suntan lotion and a drink with a pretty paper umbrella in it. AHHHHHH, Christmas in San Diego
This, to a woman who is watching snow fall in her back yard. Read More…