My mom tells the story of a cross-country road trip we made when my sisters were nine, three, and one, and in which I, a precocious 6-year-old, had stretched Mom’s patience to the limit. The specifics of my behavior during that trek in our VW van are lost in the mists of time, but the centerpiece image of Mom’s story is crystal clear: Me stomping my little self-righteous self into the Redwoods at the side of the road for a potty break—sparks of indignation shooting from my body and my ponytail whipping side to side—and my mom grumbling, “I hope she gets lost.” Read More…
The Halverson’s summer tour of San Diego’s beaches moves to La Jolla. Seal Beach, to be precise. Okay, it’s actually called Casa Beach (or Children’s Pool), but I prefer Seal Beach, because that’s what it is. For some reason that can only be explained by Mother Nature, a colony of seals have staked out a sheltered stretch of beach in La Jolla and will not be moved. I love having them there. They are gorgeous and amazing and a welcome sight for curious three-year-olds. But they are also troublemakers. Read More…
The Osmonds had the Andy Williams Show. The Hansons had MTV. The Halversons have Karaoke night at Fuddruckers. Like all great musical discovery stories, my three sons weren’t aiming for the stars when they traipsed into Fuddrucker’s hamburger joint this evening. They were there for live jazz music, which is the scheduled entertainment at Fuddruckers every third Tuesday. Not this Tuesday. This night, instead of trumpets and saxophones, there was an old guy with an overbite, a Hawaiian shirt, cowboy boots, and a Karaoke machine. And two feet from him was a rotating selection of hamburger diners feeling their musical oats, happily warbling out songs like Bon Jovi’s “Dead or Alive” and Jefferson Airplane’s psychedelic ode “White Rabbit” and Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs.” My boys loved it, so we stayed. Who needs jazz when you’ve got Barry Manilow and Jefferson Airplane sharing a stage? Read More…
Three-year-olds are impressionable. That’s one of the reasons we don’t watch TV or movies in this house. Only, it turns out my boys don’t need TV or movies to pick up things—all they need is a window.
My neighbor across the street, Ramone, leaves for work when the boys eat breakfast. The boys watch him through the window as he drives off, a baseball hat on his head, while they eat their oatmeal. Ramone wears that hat every day, and its direction each morning determines the direction of my firstborn son’s hat that day. Read More…
I’m stunningly grateful, and it’s time I said so publicly. I was just emailing a wonderful new mom, thanking her for the words of encouragement she sent my way regarding my efforts to keep all my balls in the air, and I realized that the thank you I was writing to her can—and should—be made to all the moms I’ve encountered in the three years since my triplets were born.
When my boys were still infants, it seemed like each day was twenty-four hours of constant crying (theirs and, yes, mine). In a grab at sanity, I plopped two of my babies into a double jogger and strapped one to my chest and started pushing. They were quiet, so I pushed further. Soon I was logging 8 miles a day on our Double Bob and then on the 
rickety Peg Perego triplet stroller. I was sleep deprived and shuffling from a c-section as well as sheer exhaustion, yet I kept pushing. Read More…
It’s gotta be weird to pop into a bookstore during your vacation and walk smack into a table of books with grinning hot dog faces on them, and then see some lady grinning at you from between the stacks with an equally goofy grin. But 14-year-old Monica of North Carolina went with the moment last week at my first BIG MOUTH signing at Borders in Downtown San Diego,
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Most kids love shouting “Watch me!” and then doing something silly or clever or otherwise worth watching. I remember being a kid who loved shouting “Watch me!” and doing something silly or clever or otherwise worth watching.
My question is, how can kids who love shouting “Watch me!” forget so easily that someone is watching? Read More…
How long would it take your family to eat everything in your refrigerator and cupboards, at normal Daily Food Consumption Rate? The Halversons are about to find out because we’re now in the process of trying to eat everything out of our refrigerator and cupboards by the time we hand over our house key to the teacher who’ll be living here while we’re gone. Seems kind of dumb, I suppose, but I want to get down to the bare nub of everything so that the moment before we drop the key in the teacher’s palm, I can trash our refrigerator remnants. Seriously, would you want to move into a house with the previous owner’s half-used ketchup bottle in the fridge? Gross.
And so begins yet another pre-UK summer mission: By the time our plane’s wheels leave terra firma, Mother Halverson’s cupboards will be bare. Read More…
Once again, hot dogs steal the headlines of America’s newspapers–no, make that the WORLD’s newpapers: Joey Chestnut retained the Mustard Yellow Belt, eating 59 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes, plus another 5 more in a sudden death tie-breaker against his nemesis, Takeru “Tsunami” Kobayashi. In the end, Chestnut beat Tsunami by a single dog.
Since BIG MOUTH features this event and just pubbed last month, I’d wanted to be at the contest Read More…
There’s a Mustard Rebellion in my new novel BIG MOUTH: The students of Del Heiny Junior High #13 tag their school with mustard to rebel against the school’s tomato-obsessed sponsor, Del Heiny Ketchup Company. (Hey, if your mascot were changed from the Mighty Marauders to the Proud Plum Tomatoes, you’d have angst, too. At least Del Heiny Jr 13 didn’t get the Big Burpee tomato as a mascot. Life is hard enough without being a Big Burpee.) I invented the Mustard Revolution out of thin air; it was a natural outgrowth of a scenario in which a ketchup company sponsors a school district. But in one of those fantastic “Life Is Stranger Than Fiction” moments, I’ve since learned of a real town that conducts a condiment war of its own: Buñol, Spain, host of the annual La Tomatina, a festival in which tens of thousands of people hurl tomatoes at each other in what has to be the world’s biggest food fight. Read More…
“How many can YOU eat?” In the spirit of the Fourth of July, the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Championship, and the publishing of my teen novel BIG MOUTH, I’m launching a website dedicated to BIG MOUTH and the quirkiest All-American food ever: hot dogs.
www.BigMouthTheBook.com has excerpts from the book, fun facts about competitive eating, hot dogs, ketchup, etc., and a store that ties into the theme of the book. I had a great time researching the food facts and strange eating habits of this country for the website. I hope what I’ve found will put a smile on people’s faces. Some of the stuff really made me laugh. A museum dedicated solely to mustard? A 170-foot tall ketchup bottle? Read More…
With my novel BIG MOUTH debuting in stores, the time has come to launch the “Me and My Big Mouth” behind-the-book blog series. And I figured the most appropriate way to launch this sneak-peek series would be to interrupt it with a commercial break before it even gets started. After all, BIG MOUTH is full of commercial interruptions. Jingles, ads, TV commercials…they’re all in there.
There’s a logic for this commercialization of literature, I swear. Read More…
Look out, Anne Geddes, I am now a photographer . . . of boiled tube meat. Yes, I know, you thought I was a writer. And I am. But my second novel BIG MOUTH is about competitive hot dog eating, and I’m creating a website about it that will go live in a few days, and I needed an image of a hot dog that did not exist. What to do about that? Why, do my own hot dog photo shoot, of course! Read More…
Do you prefer your radio with ketchup or mustard? I suppose it doesn’t matter, actually, as I’ll be serving up both—along with a generous helping of hot dogs and BIG MOUTH anecdotes—on ESPN 1600 AM Radio’s “Live with Lisa on The Daily Flow Show” this coming Saturday morning. (12:00 EST, 10:00 Central, 9:00 PST) The topic will be “Food, Fitness, & the Fourth of July.” How do you like that? A radio show with the very themes that fill BIG MOUTH! And after chatting briefly with the host Lisa today, I can tell it will be a lively and funny few minutes. She’s a hoot.
“Live with Lisa on The Daily Flow” is a radio show for Read More…
