Deborah Halverson's Blog

A pink tent sprouted in my house last weekend. It was no accidental sprouting, though. I planted the thing myself. It was a tent from San Diego’s 2007 Breast Cancer 3-Day walk that I’d procured from my sister* to give my boys a chance to sleep in a tent like the one I’ll be sleeping in for the next two nights as part of the 2009 Breast Cancer 3-Day walk. My triplet boys were giddy with the novelty of camping in the living room.

And being the complete idiot that I am, I fed their hysterical state with sugar in the form of s’mores. Hey, the perils of a sugar-induced human tornado aside, s’mores are an essential part of camping and could not be omitted from this living room camping extravaganza, right? Right!

That said, there may be better ideas than handing three four-year-olds metal pokers and setting them in front of an open flame. My stress level was pretty high for the twenty terror-filled minutes of marshmallow roasting. Each boy lit several marshmallows on fire. Two of them dropped various elements of their s’mores on the driveway. And more than one marshmallow was trashed because “it has a black spot, Mommy. I can’t eat a burned marshmallow!” On the upside, no one dropped his marshmallow directly into the barbecue, so there was no destruction of property. My blood pressure probably took a hit, but our property value did not.

And I did do something particularly right: My husband and I decided not nap the boys. We let them get as exhausted as possible before we put them inside that pink tent with each other.

I considered zipping the front flap shut and then running, but that’s the sort of behavior that gets a parent arrested, so I threw a pillow down next to the opening and laid down, fully prepared to leap up and pull boys out if broken limbs seemed imminent. Although they were silly for a while, exhaustion kicked in even more quickly than I could’ve hoped and the boys fell asleep in about twenty minutes. Hurrah! And not a single bone was broken.

So now the boys are happy because they slept in a pink tent before Mommy did, and I’m happy because I saw that the tents are much bigger than I’d expected. All in all, I’d call this weekend’s pink tent test a success. I am now officially ready to camp on the streets of San Diego.

It’s a good thing, too, because the walk starts tomorrow morning and goes through Sunday afternoon. I believe I’m ready. I’ve raised $3,300. I’ve broken in two pairs of walking shoes, nine pairs of socks, and three team shirts. I’ve stocked up on gluten-free protein bars and Advil. I’ve done back-to-back twelve-mile training walks and lived to tell about it. And I’ve printed a card with the names of everyone who has donated to this cause through me, including the anonymous San Diegans I’m calling our “Pink Lemonade Project Friends,” which I will carry around my neck on a lovely lanyard for all 60 miles to remind me of who I walk for and who I walk with.

Now all that’s left is walking twenty miles a day for three days shoulder to shoulder with four amazing fellow moms of triplets. Yep, I’m definitely ready.

*The San Diego walk is the last of the Susan G. Komen 3-Day walks each year, so the tents are donated to local girl scout troops. Isn’t that a cool thing to do?