Deborah Halverson's Blog

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…

My mother-in-law, the big chicken, chose to flee England rather than live under the threat of a TV Licensing Enforcement Division invasion. In fact, I have no doubt that right this second she’s sitting on the couch in her home in San Diego, California, with her TV on at full volume, all her window blinds up, thumbing her unlicensed nose at the licensing officers that have me, her son, and our four-year-old triplets peeking through the mail slot in our front door at the merest hint of footsteps. She’s a rebel, that Grandma S. A rebel who has abandoned us in favor of a country that doesn’t have TV Licensing vans cruising the streets with special TV-sensing technologies probing every nook and cranny. Read More…

How does it feel to be reading the blog of a presumed criminal? You are, you know, it says so here in this letter I’m holding, which I received from “The Enforcement Division” of a mysterious body called “TV Licensing.” A British government body? A private company? I don’t know, the letter doesn’t tell me that. It just tells me that the “TV Licensing Enforcement Division is proceeding with a full investigation” of my home. Why? “Because there is no record of a TV license at this property.” Gasp! No TV license for the Halverson house? The horror!!!!

We don’t own a TV.

The TV Licensing Enforcement Division. It sounds like something out of Fahrenheit 451, which Read More…

It’s tough being a little boy. All that mouth-bashing against the banister when you trip on the stairs and that flipping over your truck when you hit a rock and that clambering blindly into beds of stinging nettle…. Ouch! It’s enough to make a grown man cry. It certainly made my sons cry this week—every single one of them.

Even as I marvel at how my middle son doesn’t usually cry when he gets hurt, I am on a mission to help my sons understand that crying from pain is not ‘sissy,’ just as I’m on a mission to teach my sons to rush to their brother’s—or anyone else’s—aid when he does, inevitably, crash and burn. I think that lesson is seeping in good and well, and hallelujah for it! When one of my sons does a face plant or gets a mighty rug burn Read More…

My second-born triplet is one tough nut. When he gets hurt, he’s the epitome of that old saying, “Just walk it off.” Honestly, the child can have blood running down his arm and dripping into the dirt but he won’t even pause to wince. Last week, on Grandma S’s final weekend here, he twisted his ankle on a huge jumpie ‘pillow’ at Fritton Lake near Great Yarmouth . . . but kept right on jumping. The boy limped for three days afterward, but he barely batted an eye when he first collapsed from the twist. With this boy, you know he’s really hurt if he cries from an injury.

So tonight, Read More…

My husband and I are slowly losing our edge. And when you’re the parents of spirited four-year-old triplet boys, edge is everything.

In the early days of our boys’ lives, when they first showed signs of understanding human speech, Read More…

My friend, the amazing mother of the Amazing Trips, alerted me today that I’d been named 2009 Mother of the Year. How do you like that?! Here’s the link to the announcement on CNNBC. Pay attention to the last line—it torpedoes my entire personal hygiene strategy right out of the water.

Stay tuned until Read More…

My husband is a big ol’ cheater. Here I had my camera all charged up and ready to video tape his efforts to catch the baby goats at Pet’s Corner today, and he goes and just plops himself tush down on a stump and lets the goats come to him. What about all the stooping and making weird “heeere, goatie, goatie” noises and having goats escape between his legs that I’d been hoping to capture for posterity? Grandma caught me on film doing that. I feel cheated, big time.

*Sigh* Despite my dissatisfaction over my husband’s clever ploy for luring in goats, we had a great time showing Daddy around Pet’s Corner. Well, except for that brief moment when Cassie the Baby Goat thought my son was a baby goat, too, and headbutted him in the forehead Read More…

Children believe their parents can do anything. Sadly, all too often those beliefs are far out of touch with reality. Take, for instance, my sons’ belief that I could catch a baby goat for each of them. I grew up on the beach and reading books, not dealing with livestock on a farm. I have no experience catching goats.

That fact was readily apparent last week when my sons, Grandma S., and I came upon the goat corral at Pet’s Corner, a petting zoo in Oulton Broad, just up the street from our temporary house in Lowestoft, England. Read More…

My friend recently blogged about a family that didn’t clean their dishes or wash the mold out of their shower. They let ‘need’ dictate their chore priority. When their dishes overflowed the sink and they had no more to use, they’d wash them. They said they didn’t want to spend time cleaning when they could spend that time doing other things. It wasn’t at all important for them to have a tidy and organized space. The blog post generated a lot of comments. One reader cautioned that the family should think about their children’s future spouses because, when a spouse doesn’t learn to clean and the other one needs help cleaning, it can become a big point of contention in a relationship. And kids definitely mirror what they see and hear in their early years. Interesting point—I know my three four-year-olds copy what I do. Read More…

When I’m not traipsing around Europe with triplet preschoolers or writing novels, I am a freelance editor helping other writers polish their manuscripts for submission to publishers. One particular writer I’ve been working with has been revising her manuscript, moving fast and furious and absolutely loving every minute of that revision—until last weekend, when her good friend’s brother was killed by a drunk driver. The writer now finds herself stumbling with the revision, Read More…

Books and shuttle buses were the big deal for the day last year when I and my husband took our then 3-year-old triplets to the first San Diego Children’s Book Festival and had a knock-it-out-of-the-park good time. I’ll miss this year’s festival thanks to this year-long adventure of ours in Lowestoft, England, but YOU don’t have to. Here are the details or go to their website at www.sandiegobookfestival.org: Read More…