Easter Basket Filler Ideas – Beyond the Chocolate Bunnies? Help! @olivia_flor: Hey everyone! Olivia from Tucson here. Hope you all are having a great week, even with these saguaros trying to bloom early in the heat. Getting a jump on Easter planning this year, which for me usually means an Amazon Prime cart overflowing with…
Houston humidity is a beast that eats hairspray for breakfast, but it is nothing compared to the chaos of twelve three-year-olds in a living room. On March 12, 2024, I stood in my sister-in-law’s kitchen, staring at a pile of discarded pink cardboard and wondering where my life went wrong. My niece Lily was turning…
Chicago wind rattled the windowpanes of our cramped Logan Square apartment on April 12, 2025, just as I was frantically taping snowflake cutouts to the radiator. My twins, Leo and Maya, were turning three, and the “Frozen” fever had hit our household with the force of a polar vortex. I had exactly $64 in my…
I stood in my Atlanta kitchen on June 12, 2023, covered in what I thought was chocolate sauce but turned out to be liquid smoke. My son, Leo, was turning fifteen, and he had decided—after months of being “too cool” for anything—that he wanted a Western-themed bash. Not a “cowboy” party like the ones we…
My kitchen smelled like wet cardboard and cheap green spray paint for three days straight before my twins, Leo and Sam, turned two on April 12, 2024. Living in a cramped apartment in Chicago during a particularly drizzly spring meant I had to figure out how to entertain twelve toddlers without spending my rent money…
My 11-year-old daughter, Maya, looked me dead in the eye last Tuesday and told me her birthday needed to be “vibey, not basic,” which is apparently suburban Portland code for “Mom, do not even think about putting up those cardboard cutouts of Mirabel from the grocery store.” It is a brutal transition when your kids…
My kitchen floor in Beaverton was a disaster zone last October 12th. I’m talking red icing smeared on the baseboards, pink glitter in the grout, and my four-year-old, Leo, trying to eat a raw marshmallow he found under the toaster. It was 11:00 PM. I was exhausted. Maya was turning ten the next morning, and…
Last Tuesday, I found a plastic monarch wing in my coffee mug, which is just a typical morning for a second-grade teacher in the thick of spring party season here in Houston. Twenty-two seven-year-olds plus a sugar-laden sheet cake equals a specific kind of beautiful chaos that only a seasoned educator can survive without a…
Twenty-four first graders in a humid Houston classroom can smell fear, and on April 12, 2024, they smelled it on me. It was our “End of Year Hero Bash” in Room 102. I had spent exactly $118 on those flimsy, licensed character hats from a big-box store. By 1:15 PM, six elastics had snapped, two…
Twenty-two fifth-graders in a windowless Houston classroom during a thunderstorm is a recipe for a headache, but we decided to throw a full-blown indoor circus anyway. It was March 14, 2024, and Pi Day had devolved into what I like to call the Great Banner Collapse. My student Leo, who is ten and possesses the…
