Portland rain was hammering against my kitchen window last Tuesday while I sat surrounded by three half-empty coffee mugs and a mountain of silver Mylar fringe. My middle kid, Leo, decided he didn’t just want a birthday party; he wanted to go to Mars. Specifically, he wanted a “realistic” Mars mission for his 7th birthday…
Easter Craft Ideas: Did I Overthink It (Again)? My Kids Just Want the Candy Anyway… @jackson.garcia: Hey everyone, Jackson here from Sacramento. Uncle duties are in full swing for Easter this year, and I’m trying to figure out if I went a little too far down the Pinterest rabbit hole for DIY Easter Crafts for…
My living room floor was buried under a mountain of red felt and discarded gold foil on the morning of April 12, 2025. Leo and Maya, my nine-year-old twins, were vibrating with that specific brand of birthday energy that usually ends in a broken lamp. We had exactly four hours until nineteen kids descended upon…
My living room looked like a Snorlax had used it for a nap, then woke up and decided to remodel with a sledgehammer. It was July 14, 2024, and the Atlanta humidity was doing things to my hair that I didn’t think were biologically possible. I was trying to hang a custom pokemon banner for…
My Chicago apartment looked like a puppy-themed crime scene on March 12th. Blue and yellow streamers dangled precariously from the ceiling fan while my twins, Leo and Maya, chased each other with empty cardboard boxes. We were two hours away from hosting 22 hyperactive eight-year-olds for their joint birthday bash. My budget was exactly fifty…
My kitchen counter looked like a unicorn had a very messy mid-life crisis. It was June 12, 2025, and I was exactly three hours away from hosting twenty-one twelve-year-olds for my daughter Maya’s birthday. The Atlanta humidity was sitting at about ninety percent, making every paper product in the house feel slightly damp and sad….
I stood in the middle of my kitchen on April 12, 2024, staring at a dusting of flour so thick it looked like a surprise Chicago blizzard had hit my countertops. My twins, Leo and Maya, had just turned seven, and in my infinite wisdom, I decided that hosting 19 energetic second-graders for a DIY…
Twenty-two first graders. One classroom. A lot of silver glitter. That was my Tuesday morning last October when Leo decided his sixth birthday was the perfect time to “roll out” with his friends. As a teacher in Houston, I handle chaos for a living, but a room full of six-year-olds pretending to be giant robots…
Austin heat in mid-March is no joke, but my niece Harper was dead set on a winter wonderland for her ninth birthday. I spent three weeks scouring local craft stores and the internet because I wanted that perfect shimmer without it looking like a cheap glitter bomb went off in my backyard. Finding the best…
I stood on my porch in Denver last March, watching $22 worth of orange rubber fly toward my neighbor’s gutters. Leo was turning 11 on March 14, 2025. He is obsessed with the Nuggets. Naturally, I spent weeks obsessing over the perfect basketball birthday balloons that would actually survive a Colorado afternoon. My son has…
