Chicago winters do not play nice, especially when you have twins born on March 12th. Last year, Leo and Sam turned twelve. They still wanted a dinosaur theme, but they wanted it “cool” and “retro,” which basically meant they didn’t want anything that looked like a baby shower. I had exactly $35 in my pocket…
My phone screen was covered in sticky toddler fingerprints and Austin dust when I typed in some bunny party supplies near me for the third time that afternoon. It was April 12, 2025, and I was exactly forty-eight hours away from hosting eighteen six-year-olds in my backyard for Leo’s birthday. The sun was beating down…
Leo turned four on a Tuesday last November, and in typical Portland fashion, the sky opened up and dumped a month’s worth of rain on our backyard “Paw-ty” before I could even get the streamers up. My living room was suddenly a chaotic holding pen for twelve four-year-olds and a very confused golden retriever named…
I usually cap my twin girls’ birthday parties at a strict $50 limit. Living in a cramped three-bedroom apartment in Chicago, that barely buys a decent delivery pizza, let alone a magical woodland aesthetic. But for Maya and Chloe’s 10th birthday last October 12th, I decided to stretch my own rules. Double digits demanded something…
My kitchen table currently looks like a glitter bomb went off in a flour mill, but that’s the price you pay for twin seven-year-olds who decided their birthday theme was “Ultimate Dojo Bash” roughly four days before the actual date. It was March 12, 2026, and a Chicago sleet storm was rattling my windows, making…
The humidity in Houston on April 12, 2025, felt like breathing through a warm, wet washcloth, and I had twenty-two nine-year-olds staring at me with the intensity of a pack of hungry wolves. Tyler, a sweet kid with a mean left-handed pitch, was turning ten, and his mom had asked me to help organize a…
My daughter Maya stared at me with the kind of intensity usually reserved for high-stakes poker players or cats watching a laser pointer. It was March 12, 2026, and she had just turned eight. She didn’t want a bouncy castle, a magician, or a trip to the zoo. She wanted a “Cat-stravaganza.” Now, as a…
My kitchen looked like a snow globe filled with King Arthur All-Purpose flour on the afternoon of April 12, 2025. Maya, my nine-year-old daughter, stood in the center of the chaos, her face smeared with a terrifying amount of pink buttercream frosting. Around her, fifteen other nine-year-olds were engaged in what can only be described…
My kitchen smelled like burnt sugar and floor cleaner on the Tuesday morning after Leo turned six, which is basically the official scent of motherhood in suburban Portland if you ask any of my neighbors. I was staring at a mountain of primary-colored plastic blocks while my four-year-old tried to feed a stray brick to…
My living room looked like a Category 5 hurricane hit a Home Depot. Yellow latex scraps clung to my sweat-drenched forehead while I wrestled a 36-inch Mylar bulldozer balloon that seemed intent on escape. This wasn’t for my five-year-old, Leo. No, this was for my brother-in-law Dave’s 40th “Over the Hill and Under Construction” bash…
