Deborah Halverson's Blog

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! Not that I was willy-nilly about my decision to take these kids on the road. I first took all three of them to the surgery here in Lowestoft for an official exam. The doctor there couldn’t say whether they were suffering from food poisoning as we thought or from any of the myriad V&D bugs going around. “They’ll be fine in a couple of days. Go on vacation,” she said. Now had this swine flu been in the news at the time—oy! As it was, I knew nothing about swine flu and, having received the doc’s a-okay to embark on the trip since the boys were improving, vacationing we went.

By Madrid, city #2 of our trip, the boys were well. They still weren’t eating much, mind you—which I have to admit was kind of nice on the pocket book since a huge expense of traveling is feeding the troops. (Did I just type that? Bad Mommy….) But otherwise they were just fine and able to enjoy a city tour of Madrid, the capital and largest city of Spain. Our favorite stop was the Palacio Real de Madrid, pictured above, which had wonderful gardens bursting with hedges they could race around and a huge pond to tempt them. (Ever been with three preschoolers at the edge of a pond? It’s not possible to hold their shirt-backs at the same time, and inevitably the one you aren’t holding is the one who spots the fish waaaaaaaay over there and leans out far enough to make you lunge for him—and compromise your own footing. Yeah, it’s real relaxing, hanging out at ponds with multiples.) Even better than the Palacio, though, was the fantastic children’s park across the street. Situated in a gorgeous town square with Madrid’s beautiful architecture looming above, this children’s park gave me the opportunity to show my boys that Mommy can still out-climb them in a pinch. Four, shmore, I’m the Queen of the World! I’m sure it didn’t hurt my cause that the boys were still weak from their illness. At full throttle, they probably would’ve raced right over me like so many ants in our scramble for the top, slowed only by the road bump that would be my nose. It’s survival of the fittest when you have triplet boys, that’s for sure.

Madrid also offered us something that seemed specially ordered for the Halversons—an Ibis Hotel located right next to an auto body shop. Eureka! The curbs outside our hotel were lined with crunched up cars, and my boys meticulously studied each and every one. You’d think they were accident inspectors, the way they brainstormed the cause of impacts and the use for each part or wire hanging out of the crumpled heaps.

I’ve said it before, I know, but it is absolutely true: traveling with preschoolers yields vacation adventures you could never, in your wildest dreams, predict.