Deborah Halverson’s Blog

It’s not every year you get to celebrate the Fourth of July in the Mother Country. I, personally, will be celebrating it at the 02 Arena in London with Madonna and a few thousand of her friends. My sons and husband will be celebrating it here in Lowestoft, on the easterliest tip of England, without me.

Realizing we’d be several hours apart on the big day, last Friday I suggested to my three sons that we throw a traditional Fourth of July BBQ two days early, on the Second of July. Being four-year-olds, they are completely oblivious of dates and couldn’t care less what any of the words coming out of my mouth meant besides “party.” “Apple pie” and “ice cream” struck a chord with them, though. Of course they wanted a party with apple pie and ice cream. What kind of an idiot would even have to ask?

Apparently, the same kind of idiot who plans a BBQ without actually owning a barbeque, and who buys two cans of hot dogs (yes, cans, because as the ASDA employee explained to me, British people just don’t ‘do’ hot dogs like American people do) without owning a can opener. Yes, this was going to be a celebration like none other. Read More…

Four-year-olds think they’re pretty clever. Sneaking into the refrigerator, snatching something tasty-looking, cruising past Mommy with hands behind back, ducking under the table and covertly eyeing Mommy as little hands slooooowly move mouthward and CHOMP CHOMP CHOMP CHOMP CHOMP….

But four-year-olds aren’t half as clever as they think.

Yesterday I witnessed this scenario first hand. My middle son, our fraternal angel with his heart of gold, has a habit of eating other people’s unattended food. Read More…

There’s something deeply satisfying about shattering a dinner plate into a million pieces on purpose. Especially to a woman who’s been cooped up with three fever-ridden four-year-olds for almost two weeks.

In turn, all three of our triplets have been laid up for four days at a stretch, alternating between fevers spiking past 104 degrees and chills sending them diving under comforters. Because they haven’t had the energy to do more than play in the back yard for a few minutes every couple of days, I’ve had to keep the vaguely healthy boys occupied mostly indoors for fourteen hours in a row while doting on the sickie of the moment. This, for twelve days straight. Read More…

The bus approached our stop, slowing and turning on its blinker. I dropped to my knees and grouped my three four-year-old sons around me in a huddle. “Alright, boys,” I said. “Are you ready?” They nodded eagerly. They’d been planning this all morning. Oh, boy, were they were ready. The bus came to a stop behind me. I glanced over my shoulder at the driver. Bingo! It was V., one of our favorite drivers. What a way to kick this off. I turned back to my little wannabe bus drivers. “Okay, guys, here goes. Operation Bus Driver begins!” Read More…

My dad has 193 screwdrivers. That’s what he told my three four-year-old sons yesterday anyway. Does he really have that many screwdrivers? I honestly don’t know. It’s possible—the man has more tools than a car repair garage, a fact that meant hours of fun for me when I was little. I loved poking through his tool drawers, trying figure out what each curved, hinged, and often menacing tool could do. Even now I get fascinated by a new tool with a mysterious shape. Does it bend things? Does it torque them? Does is pound or pull or twist them? Swiss Army knives give me far more fun than they should as I pull out each little tool in turn and examine it closely, imagining how it would save my life should I take a left when I should’ve taken a right on some remote forested hiking trail. My Dad once told me you can kill a bear with a Swiss Army knife. Read More…

My country is in the grips of a major crisis. It’s so bad that the U.S. government initiated outreach programs, established and staffed national hotlines, sprung billions of dollars in emergency funds, and enlisted the help of dozens of groups including volunteers from AmeriCorps, civil rights groups, and even firefighters. Yet despite everyone’s Herculean efforts, millions of America’s were still unprepared when calamity struck last week. This week a heart-pounding government news release addressed the disaster:

“Over the next few days, weeks and perhaps months, we need to keep our efforts in overdrive, continuing to conduct a national field, phone and Internet operation. We need to ’search and rescue’ Read More…

I can add a new skill to my Mommy repertoire: Terrier Tossing. Turns out I can throw one seven feet in the blink of an eye. How do I know this? Because three days ago I grabbed a stray Terrier as he pounced on my son in the park and then I hucked that beast aside like yesterday’s newspaper. And had he come back for more, my right foot was poised to try out a skill known in Mommy circles as Kicking the Whatzit Out of the Terrier Who Tackled My Son. Luckily for all parties, no such foot skill proved necessary. A good Samaritan took charge of the dog who jumped us and got him to heel.

It didn’t start out as a day for dogs. Read More…

I think about Jose every day. Many times every day, in fact. Jose* is a four-year-old we met in the Lisbon airport as we waited to board our plane for Madrid. He and my three four-year-olds spoke entirely different languages, but they didn’t need words to bond. They had cars. He had one in each hand, and our boys had backpacks full of them, and thus a friendship was struck up. Jose sat in front of us on the plane. Again, no words were needed—the boys passed a pad of paper back and forth, taking turns drawing pictures for each other. We have one of those pictures, drawn and autographed by Jose, on the art wall in our Lowestoft kitchen. Read More…

Men will bond over any number of things. Sports, cars, tools, music… Dead Fly Pies. That last one, more humanely called Eccles Cakes, is what my three sons and my husband have bonded over here in England. When they go out together, I know that at some point they’ll end up walking out of a bakery with a bag of Eccles Cakes and a pint of milk. They are happy as clams, sitting together on benches, mowing through their cakes and milk. They’re really going to miss the Eccles Cakes Experience when we fly home over the Pond next month.

Or will they? Yesterday at breakfast the boys and I were talking about how great their daddy is. We decided to surprise him with something when he came home from school. We would bake him Eccles Cakes. Not that any of us knew how. Read More…

Yet again, we walked into adventure. It’s become a joke between my husband and I that we can just walk out our front door and something extraordinary will happen. Bulldozers driving past us on the beach, cars crashing into our front tree, photographers shooting us for the local paper, total strangers enlisting us to help re-landscape their lawns, rescue helicopters landing across the street…. What happened this weekend was fire. Read More…

Okay, this is it, the souvenir of all souvenirs—an appearance in a British newspaper. Can you see me and the boys in the group photo? Right there, in the lower left. Click on the photo if that helps—it’ll enlarge on your screen. See, I’m not lying. Now how’s that for memorializing our year in Lowestoft?

This shot was taken Read More…

I pulled a muscle in my neck while crawling underneath the back of our toilet this morning. It’s not my normal morning routine, wrapping myself around the base of the commode, but I was trying to figure out where the heck all my sons’ pee was going, because it wasn’t all going into the bowl, I can tell you that much.

This pain in my neck really began six months ago, when my triplet boys turned four. They’re doing so much themselves now—the most pertinent to me at this moment being the potty process. They do the whole thing solo, from deciding they have to go to doing the deed to wiping themselves and the rim to closing the lid and flushing to washing their hands (with soap!). The thing is, while their aim is better than it was when I first tried this a year ago and immediately reverted back to me doing everything for them, it’s still erratic. In this year’s initial days of independent whizzing, I supervised, including the clean-up part. “There, you missed a streak on the wall. No, higher. Yeah, there. Good boy. Nice wiping technique.” Now the boys won’t let me near the room. “Pribacy, pwease,” they declare, then shut the door. And I’m fine with that, really. But little boys unsupervised in the john… the smell—oh, holy mother of all things odiferous and lovely, the smell. Read More…

The Halversons’ seven-day half term STAYcation in their temporary home town of Lowestoft, England, comes to an end.

I gotta start playing the lottery. I don’t know any other way to rake in a fortune fast to let my husband stay home with us all the time, staring now. The boys simply adore the time they spend with their daddy. We’re spoiled, though, with him being a teacher and getting all those school vacations. Last week was our last ‘term break’ in England, and we did so much in such a short time—but the best part was that we did it all with Daddy.

The boys were so proud to take their dad to the Children’s Center so that he could see where they spend several days each week. Read More…

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…