My daughter Maya looked me dead in the eye three weeks before her birthday and said she wanted a “High Tea” experience. I am a single dad in Atlanta who barely knows the difference between oolong and orange pekoe, and my bank account was still reeling from a $400 alternator repair on my old Ford….
My living room smelled like old library books and cheap grape juice last Tuesday. This wasn’t the plan. I spent three weeks hunting for the perfect vintage birthday party supplies to celebrate my twins, Leo and Maya, hitting the big age of four. We live in a cramped Logan Square apartment in Chicago where space…
I spent six hours on the floor of my Atlanta apartment last March, surrounded by half-eaten chicken nuggets and a pile of cardboard, desperately searching for transformers party supplies for adults that didn’t look like they were made for a high chair. My son Leo was turning four on April 12, 2024, and I had…
My backyard in Austin felt like the surface of the sun on August 14, 2025, when my nephew Leo turned eight. I was three iced coffees deep, sweating through a linen jumpsuit, and staring at a stack of cardboard boxes that promised to turn my dusty patio into Brisbane. Planning a party for fourteen eight-year-olds…
Glitter is the herpes of the craft world, and after hosting fifteen screaming eleven-year-olds for Maya’s “Dreamhouse Graduation” last May, I am still finding pink specks in my teacher’s lounge coffee mug. Houston humidity was sitting at a thick 98 percent that Saturday afternoon, making every single pink streamer stick to the kids’ foreheads like…
Hey everyone! Levi here, you know me, @levidoesparties from sunny Jacksonville, Florida. Easter is just around the corner, and I’m already feeling that familiar pre-holiday scramble. My three kiddos—Liam, who’s 10 now, Emma at 12, and my oldest, Zoe, who’ll be 13 right after Easter—are definitely past the age where a few chocolate bunnies and…
I am standing in the middle of a Decatur party rental warehouse at 2:00 AM, covered in silver glitter and questioning every life choice that led me here. My sister Sarah turned forty last November, and because I’m the “creative one” in the family—a title I earned by accidentally making a decent balloon arch for…
I sat on my kitchen floor in Logan Square, surrounded by twenty empty egg cartons and a very confused cat named Barnaby. My twins, Maya and Leo, wanted a farm. Not a petting zoo trip. Not a pony ride. They wanted a full-blown barnyard bash inside our third-floor walk-up. I had a thirty-five-dollar budget and…
Thirteen nine-year-olds screaming in the middle of Humboldt Park is a sound you never forget, especially when you are the one who handed them the whistles. It was June 12, 2025, a Saturday that felt like a furnace, and I was determined to pull off my twins’ 9th birthday for exactly $35. Leo and Maya…
My living room smelled like burnt sugar and sheer desperation on October 14, 2024. That was the day I learned that a professional-grade cotton candy machine and a 1920s bungalow with old wiring do not mix. Leo, my son, was turning six. I had promised him the world, or at least a backyard that looked…
