My son Leo turned 11 on March 12, 2025, and as a safety-conscious dad in Denver, I knew a backyard carnival was the only way to satisfy a group of pre-teens who think they are too cool for “little kid” games but still want to win a giant stuffed bear. The wind was whipping off…
My living room currently looks like a glitter bomb went off in a Skittles factory, and I’m not even mad about it because Leo’s face when he saw the rainbow party hats for kids lined up on the counter was worth every single stray sequin. The rain was coming down in that grey, horizontal way…
Fourteen eight-year-olds staring at you with expectation is a level of pressure most corporate executives will never understand. Last Saturday, June 14, my backyard in Denver transformed into a high-stakes tea parlor for my daughter Lily’s birthday. I am the guy who reads the fine print on toaster manuals, so naturally, I spent three weeks…
Twenty five-year-olds in white t-shirts are basically a herd of highly caffeinated cats who think they know jiu-jitsu. I stood in my Houston living room last March, watching my nephew Leo try to “karate chop” a stack of napkins, and I knew I had two choices: spend five hundred dollars at a local dojo or…
The basement floor was a battlefield of orange polyester scraps and stray googly eyes when I realized I had peak-dad-ed myself into a corner on March 14, 2025. My daughter Maya, turning seven, had requested a “sparkly old-school” theme, which translated in her brain to disco balls and in mine to a feverish search for…
My living room smelled like a soggy Amazon warehouse last October. Cardboard. Everywhere. My oldest, Leo, turned 11, and he’d decided he was too “mature” for the local bounce house but still wanted to hunt for gold. This is the struggle of the middle-school transition years in Portland, where it rains 150 days a year…
Theodore Robinson: My Luna, bless her two-year-old heart, has decided that Hello Kitty is the pinnacle of existence. Now, I love my grandkids more than anything, but when Isla (my eight-year-old artist) suggested a Hello Kitty birthday party for Luna that also included her friends, and Caleb (the nine-year-old engineer) started drawing blueprints for a…
My kitchen counter was a literal disaster zone on the morning of October 12, 2024, as I tried to finalize the cowboy birthday invitation for my son Sam’s 10th birthday. There were coffee rings on the cardstock, half-eaten Cheerios from my four-year-old, Leo, and a stack of “Wanted” posters that looked more like they’d been…
My living room looked like a Serengeti stampede hit a glitter factory. It was March 15, 2025, and my son Leo was turning two. Twenty-one toddlers were about to descend on my North Denver bungalow, and I had exactly $47 left in the party kitty after the cake deposit. My mission was specific: I needed…
My kitchen floor still has a faint yellow stain from the time I tried to make “Pikachu Punch” using industrial-grade food coloring back on June 12, 2024. That was for Leo’s fourth birthday, and my $45 investment in DIY decor resulted in three crying toddlers and a very yellow rug. Since then, I’ve learned that…
