Twenty-one toddlers. One exhausted teacher. Three rolls of white yarn that looked suspiciously like a giant cat had lost a fight with a knitting machine. It was March 12, 2024, and the Houston humidity was already making my hair frizz into a halo of frustration. My student Leo was turning three, and his mother had…
The Austin sun was absolutely relentless on June 12, 2025, when I decided to host a “Dog Days of Summer” graduation bash for my nephew, Leo. He just finished third grade, and he is still—bless his heart—obsessed with Chase and Marshall. I love a good theme, but I draw the line at a backyard that…
Austin in August feels like standing inside a giant, humid blow-dryer, but that didn’t stop me from trying to recreate the coolest bedroom aesthetic of 2001 for my dog’s third birthday. My Golden Retriever, Barnaby, sat there looking regal and slightly confused on August 14, 2025, while I frantically tried to light a set of…
Leo turned three on March 12, 2024, and I decided, in my infinite Austin-mom wisdom, that we absolutely had to have a full-blown Mushroom Kingdom in our tiny backyard. It was eighty-five degrees. The humidity was already creeping up. I had seventeen toddlers coming over, a dog named Cooper who thinks balloons are personal enemies,…
I sat on my kitchen floor last Saturday surrounded by seventeen half-eaten arepas and enough purple glitter to be seen from the International Space Station. My niece, Maya, had just turned four, and she insisted on a Mirabel celebration that didn’t involve her parents taking out a second mortgage. Being an elementary teacher in Houston…
Popcorn hulls still turn up in the crevices of my outdoor sectional three months after the big day. My nephew Leo turned four on April 12, 2025, and apparently, a carnival theme in the middle of an Austin “spring” means dealing with 95-degree heat and twenty-one toddlers hyped on sugar. I spent weeks obsessing over…
Six-year-olds are basically tiny, unpredictable sea monsters when you get them in a room filled with blue streamers and sugar. My daughter, Maya, turned six on June 12, 2025, and she made it very clear that a generic party wouldn’t cut it for her “Underwater Kingdom” bash. I spent three weeks obsessing over the perfect…
The smell of generic apple juice and the rhythmic “thump-thump” of toddlers crawling over cardboard boxes is a sound I know all too well. Being an elementary school teacher in Houston means I spend my days managing twenty-plus kids who have the attention spans of gnats and the energy of a thousand suns. When my…
My kitchen floor is currently a chaotic mosaic of blue crepe paper, half-eaten cheddar bunnies, and those tiny plastic figurines that seem designed specifically to puncture a mother’s soul through her socks. It is Tuesday morning in rainy Portland, and I am three cups of coffee deep into recovering from my son Leo’s 4th birthday…
Chicago winters usually linger until May, so when my twins, Aria and Leo, turned eight on March 12 last year, I knew we were stuck indoors with a living room full of hyperactive third graders. Aria had been obsessed with “Under the Sea” themes since she saw a stray goldfish at the Shedd Aquarium, but…
