Seven-year-olds are basically caffeinated squirrels in jerseys. Last March 14, 2025, my son Leo turned seven, and my backyard in Austin looked like a chaotic tryout for the Spurs. We had 17 kids screaming, a Golden Retriever named Barnaby trying to eat the streamers, and a Texas sun that refused to quit. I thought I…
Easter Basket Dilemmas: Surviving the Sugar Rush with Non-Candy Fillers Hey everyone, Marcus here from San Francisco. You know, Easter is coming up fast, and with Piper being 2 now, plus Owen (my 5 and 9-year-olds) and Cole (the almost-teenager at 11), I’m always trying to figure out how to make Easter baskets fun without…
The rain was slamming against the windows of our Beaverton craftsman last March, and I had fifteen first-graders vibrating with energy in my living room. My son Leo had just turned seven, and he was convinced he could climb the walls if he tried hard enough. If you live in suburban Portland, you know the…
Dogs bark. Kids scream. My kitchen smells like wet fur and sugar. It was Saturday morning, April 12, 2025, and I was knee-deep in red and blue streamers for my nephew Liam’s fourth birthday. Austin was hitting a weirdly hot ninety degrees, and I had sixteen preschoolers about to descend on my backyard. Everyone wants…
Atlanta in July feels like walking through a wet wool blanket. I had three hours before eleven pre-teens arrived at my doorstep expecting a winter wonderland, and all I had was a bag of deflated balloons and a sense of impending doom. My daughter Lily was turning twelve on April 12, 2025. She wanted a…
Glitter is still showing up in my floorboards three years later. I found a stray sequin in the vents of my Ford F-150 just last week, and my daughter, Maya, is already moving on to a “space explorer” phase. Being a single dad in Atlanta means you learn fast or you fail loud. I failed…
The living room smelled like a mixture of ozone, cheap pepperoni pizza, and the frantic desperation of a man who realized blacklights reveal every single coffee stain he’s ever made. I stood there in the dark, my face painted with neon orange stripes that made me look like a radioactive tiger, watching twelve pre-teens lose…
My kitchen smelled like a mix of sugar, floor cleaner, and slightly charred mini-pizzas last March 12, 2025, when I finally sat down after my nephew Leo’s second birthday bash. Being an elementary teacher in Houston means I handle 22 screaming kids for eight hours a day, so you’d think a dozen toddlers would be…
@marcus_partydad: Hey everyone, Marcus from Omaha here! Hope everyone had a relatively sane Easter. For us, it was… a learning experience. My wife Hannah and I have our hands full with Kai, who’s 3 and just a ball of pure energy, and Ellie, who’s 10 and thinks she’s a junior event planner. Then there’s Buster,…
My kitchen looked like a glitter bomb exploded in a popcorn factory last Saturday. I was exactly five minutes away from thirteen second-graders storming my living room in Beaverton. Sophie, my seven-year-old, was currently crying because her “royal robe”—which was actually just an old red beach towel—had a massive grape juice stain right down the…
