My kitchen floor still has a faint green stain from the time I tried to hand-paint a fifteen-foot Creeper backdrop in October 2024 for Leo’s 3rd birthday. I spent six hours searching for the best banner for minecraft party while nursing a lukewarm coffee and trying to keep the toddler from eating the glue sticks….
My twins, Maya and Leo, are currently vibrating with the kind of hormonal energy that only a fourteenth birthday and the promise of unlimited carbohydrates can produce. We live in a drafty apartment in Logan Square, Chicago, where the rent eats most of my paycheck and the wind whistles through the floorboards like a ghost…
Omaha Nanny Needs Help! Easter Egg Hunt Tips and Tricks for Big Families? Hey everyone! Madelyn here from Omaha. Hope you all had a good weekend. Easter is sneaking up on me AGAIN, and with Aria (1), Cole (3), Maya (6), Piper (9), and Hazel (13) plus Finn the poodle mix, our Easter egg hunts…
The humidity in Houston during March is a specific kind of swampy that makes construction paper curl and kindergartners particularly feral. I was standing in the middle of Room 204 last March 12, clutching a stack of spiderman birthday plates like a shield while twenty-one five-year-olds hummed with the electric energy of impending sugar consumption….
I stood in the middle of my kitchen in Atlanta last April, staring at a literal mountain of primary colors and wondering how I’d managed to fail at basic math. My son, Leo, was turning three, and I’d decided—in my infinite single-dad wisdom—that a rainbow theme was the way to go because “how hard can…
I stood in the middle of my kitchen last April, ankle-deep in blue iridescent tinsel, wondering where my life as a single dad in Atlanta had gone so horribly sideways. My daughter, Maya, was turning seven, and she had informed me—with the terrifying clarity only a first-grader possesses—that her party needed to be “colder than…
My living room looked like a Pepto-Bismol bottle exploded, and honestly, I wasn’t even mad about it. Sophie turned nine last Tuesday, and in our house, that meant one thing: Barbie. Everything had to be pink, sparkly, and “aesthetic,” which is a word 9-year-olds use way too much these days. Living in suburban Portland, I’m…
It was raining, obviously, because May in Portland is just April with a better publicist. I was standing in my kitchen on May 12, 2024, surrounded by fourteen half-glued paper fish and a very insistent 9-year-old named Leo who decided he needed his fishing invitation for kids to look “rugged but cool.” Suburban life is…
Twenty-two second graders in a small classroom with floral napkins and lukewarm chamomile tea sounds like a recipe for a workers’ compensation claim. I know because I tried it on May 14, 2025, during our end-of-year “Polite Society” reward day. My classroom smelled like wet cardboard and frantic desperation for three hours because I made…
Austin in April usually feels like a gentle hug from the sun, but on April 12, 2025, it felt like someone left the oven door open in my backyard. I stood there, clutching a melting tray of “Fire Flower” veggie sticks, watching my three-year-old nephew, Leo, slowly lose his mind because he couldn’t actually jump…
