I’m teaching my sons to moonwalk—and I’m not letting the fact that I don’t know how to moonwalk deter me. My almost-four-year-olds expressed an interest in dance when I scooped them up a few days ago and swung them around to Madonna’s “Beat Goes On”, and I will run with it. Or rather, I will trip and stumble across the living room with it. I’m a pretty heinous dancer, truth be told. Read More…
I forget my anniversary every year. So does my husband. If not for my mom and my friend Melanie sending us cards every year, we’d never know another year in our marriage had ticked by. I’d be equally forgetful about my birthday if it weren’t for the fact that it comes the day after Halloween. My husband’s birthday is a few days before Halloween. His is the one we forget.
This year, we actually DID remember his birthday—just as we, quite coincidentally, sat ourselves down in front of five plates filled with cake. Read More…
Our friend Donna, whom the boys mistook for Madonna a few weeks ago, became our first house guest in Lowestoft. Visiting from her temporary home in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, she brought along her teenage daughter—and a whopper of rainstorm.
We didn’t let the weather deter us from showing our guests the town, though. We learned long ago that Read More…
Grown-ups make a big deal about seeing the Queen’s house when you go to London. Our first piece of advice? Let them think you like it, too. Then they’ll walk you around the whole thing and you’ll see the REAL “big deal”: The guy who sweeps the leaves on the sidewalk around Buckingham Palace. Now that’s royalty.
And that Big Ben guy they keep talking about? He’s a clock. Did you know that? What’s so exciting about a big clock? It doesn’t even have any moving statues like the Astronomical Clock we saw in Prague last week. But Big Ben DOES have Read More…
“Say cheese. Cheeeeese. Cheese? C’mon, say cheese. Just once? Cheese? Please….” I take my camera with me everywhere, and until the boys turned three, this wasn’t a problem. I could get candids and posed shots with equal ease. Now, photos like this one are more the norm. Why? Because I have the audacity to ask my children to stand there and say cheese.
Three-year-olds rarely do what you ask them to do. Read More…
Imagine yourself an earthworm, squiggling on your tummy through dark tunnels no bigger than yourself, far below the earth’s surface, dirt and rock rubbing you on all sides, with nothing for it but to squiggle onward. Me, I don’t have to imagine it—I lived it.
A few years before our triplets were born, my husband and I went caving in central California. We’d gone to the caves fully intending to take a normal walking tour, quite unaware that you could do more, in fact. But a series of strange circumstances landed us in overalls with miner hats on our heads and work boots duct-taped to our feet. Read More…
Now that the U.S. presidential election is over, I’m back to posts about our holiday in the Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic…
I’m sure there’s an official name for this statue in the center of Prague’s Old Town Square, but we Halversons don’t much care. The majority of us are three-year-olds, and the ‘adult’ Halversons rather like making up new names for official statues. So this statue is “The Cranky Man” as far as we’re concerned. Please don’t take this renaming as a sign of disrespect but rather as a testament to just how closely the little boys studied that statue. “Why do all the people in it wook cwanky, Mommy?” See? Art appreciation, with a preschooler twist. Read More…
In celebration of today’s U.S. presidential election, I have been “showing reruns” of my most patriotic posts. “The Presidents and the Potty” was originally posted in February 2008, just after the primary elections, when my triplet sons had just turned three years old.
Many presidents have found that the metaphorical fall from the presidency to the potty is a short one. Maybe that’s why the toilet is also known as “the throne”? My three future presidents, who are now happily playing cars in the living room with underpants on their heads, are no exception to the presidential potty slide. Read More…
In celebration of the pending U.S. presidential election, I’m going to “show reruns” of my two most patriotic posts. I originally posted “Presidents Halverson” during the presidential primaries back in February.
My recent post about my Big Thinker—my future U.S. President—got me to Thinking Big myself: What if ALL THREE of my boys became President? Wouldn’t that be a kick?
It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Read More…
Three-year-old triplets, a two-and-a-half-hour flight from London, no nap, and a nightclub that blares music through your floorboards until 4:00 a.m. Welcome to Night #1 of our adventure in Prague, Czech Republic.
My husband and I thought we were being smart, booking an apartment in Prague instead of a regular hotel room, scoring a kitchenette, living room, and separate bedroom. We could eat breakfast and prepare lunches before setting out on adventures, then duck back and put the boys in bed for naps in the middle of the day while we whipped up quick dinners before hitting the streets again. What could be better?
Alas, that was not to be. Read More…
I do believe I blinked and turned into an ice cube. We just returned to our temporary home in Lowestoft, England, after eight days in freezing Prague and London. Guess what? It’s freezing here, too. Time for a weather report!
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, USA:
Sunny
83°F
Feels Like 78°F Read More…
Writing a novel that celebrates the best and worst of food is pretty easy—just figure out the foods you love and hate the most, then go at it. Okay, maybe that simplifies things a bit, but not all that much, really. My novel BIG MOUTH is filled with my food likes and dislikes, with Shermie voicing my personal menu word-for-word. In the candy department, my list of lifelong favorite candies includes Haribo Gold-Bear gummi bears, just like Shermie. I’m telling you, when it comes to gummies, Haribo makes the yummiest, hands down. Read More…
If you don’t know the name of something, call it some variation of “beebee.” That’s my sons’ philosophy, anyway. In their Triplet Speak language, the word “beebee” is the default when you don’t know what you’re looking at. Tack another word onto that, and you’re set.
Three days into our England adventure, Read More…
Please forgive me for tootin’ my own “horn”, but I’m thrilled to report that the new issue of The Horn Book Guide gives BIG MOUTH a cool thumbs up! The Horn Book Guide reviews over 2,000 titles in each semiannual issue — virtually every children’s and young adult book published in the United States in a six-month period. Here’s what it had to say about Big Mouth… Read More…
How many blades of grass does it take to fill a horse? That’s what my son asked me today when we visited Redwings Horse Sanctuary, at Caldecott Hall in Suffolk. We’d been watching two horses named Chanel and Oliver eating the grass non-stop for several minutes. What I particularly remember about that question is the utter seriousness with which it was asked—as if Mommy could actually answer it. Read More…