The smell of blue raspberry frosting never truly leaves a classroom carpet, and by April 14, 2025, my third-graders at Oak Forest Elementary here in Houston had earned every single sticky crumb of it. We were celebrating my “Magic & Math” reward bash for the twenty-two students who finally mastered their long division, and the…
My classroom looked exactly like a shipwrecked vessel on Friday morning, and I loved every chaotic inch of it. Twenty-one three-year-olds were about to descend upon room 104, and the blue crepe paper I taped to the ceiling was already starting to sag from the brutal Houston humidity. Last April 11, 2024, I set out…
My classroom in Houston feels like a literal jungle by 2 PM on a Friday. The smell of pencil shavings, stale Goldfish crackers, and unwashed gym socks is enough to make any sane person consider an early retirement. I don’t retire. I throw parties. Last year, on April 14, 2025, I decided my fifth graders…
My kitchen counter in Logan Square looked like a primary-colored crime scene on July 20, 2025. I had three weeks until Leo and Maya turned two, and my bank account was screaming. Twins are expensive. Birthday parties in Chicago? Even worse. I was determined to host eleven kids and their parents for under eighty-five dollars,…
My living room looked like a rainbow exploded. It was April 12, 2024, and I was exactly forty-five minutes away from fourteen two-year-olds descending upon my Chicago apartment for Maya and Leo’s second birthday. I stood on a wobbly kitchen chair, sweat beads forming on my forehead, trying to stick the last of the sleepover…
My kitchen looked like a glitter bomb exploded in a seafood restaurant on the morning of June 15, 2025. Blue and teal sequins crunched under my sneakers. Maya and Leo, my twins, were officially twelve, which is a weird age where they are too cool for everything but still secretly want a themed party. I…
I stood in the middle of Party City on Lamar Boulevard last Thursday, completely paralyzed by a wall of red and green cardboard. My best friend Jess had basically begged me to help plan her son Leo’s third birthday, knowing full well my event-planning brain thrives on chaos and strict budgets. But staring at a…
Anyone else’s Easter Egg Hunt go totally off the rails with different age groups? Help! Hi everyone! Luke from Columbus here, hoping you all had a good week. Easter is just around the corner, and I’m already in a bit of a panic about the egg hunt and party games. We’re hosting this year, and…
My living room still smells like damp burlap and cheap chocolate gold coins from the time I decided to host 22 fourth-graders for a high-seas adventure. Parents often ask me how to throw a pirate party for 9 year old without losing their sanity or their security deposit. I tell them the same thing: prepare…
The humidity in Houston on March 12, 2025, was already hitting 85 percent, which is exactly when I decided to host 21 vibrating seven-year-olds for a high-octane speedway celebration in my second-grade classroom. You haven’t known true terror until you see a child named Jaxson—with an ‘x’—wielding a chocolate-covered donut near a white lace-trimmed “Winner’s…
