My Chicago apartment still smells like pepperoni and cheap hairspray from the “Two Wild” double-digit bash I threw for my twins, Leo and Maya, last Tuesday. Most parents hear the phrase “Two Wild” and think of toddlers in diapers, but my ten-year-olds are entering their second decade, and let me tell you, they are twice…
My living room floor was buried under a drift of sleeping bags, stray socks, and half-eaten popcorn when I realized I had made a massive tactical error during Maya’s seventh birthday last October. It was 9:00 PM on a Tuesday because we are those “birthday on the actual day” people, and six screaming girls were…
My living room in Rogers Park still smells faintly of pepperoni and “Pikachu Yellow” spray paint. Last April 12, 2025, was the day my twins, Leo and Maya, hit the big 1-2. Turning twelve is a weird bridge between childhood and the “too cool for school” teen years, and in Chicago, you never know if…
My living room floor was a sea of blue glitter and half-eaten chicken nuggets by 4:00 PM on August 14th, all because I thought finding a baby shark party birthday hats set would be the easy part of Mia’s 7th birthday. It wasn’t. I spent three hours that Tuesday morning scouring the web while my…
My living room in Logan Square looked like a primary-colored disaster zone on March 14 last year. Leo and Maya were turning three, and their obsession with “the bricks” had reached a fever pitch. I sat on my worn-out velvet sofa, staring at the price of official lego plates on my phone. My jaw hit…
Leo turned twelve on March 14, 2025, and he decided his childhood was effectively over unless we hosted a high-octane “Grand Prix” in our Denver driveway. I spent three weeks researching the perfect race car crown for kids because a twelve-year-old in a flimsy paper hat is a recipe for a mood swing. We live…
Twenty-two five-year-olds are humming the “Wheels on the Bus” in unison while I try to scrape dried purple glitter off a laminate tabletop. This is my Tuesday. In Houston, we don’t just do birthdays; we do events that rival small-scale festivals, even in a cramped elementary school classroom. Last month, on March 12, I had…
My basement still smells faintly of distilled vinegar and shattered dreams, a lingering olfactory reminder of the “Great Volcano Incident” of March 14, 2025. It was Leo’s 10th birthday, and as a dad who moonlights as a consumer safety advocate here in Denver, I wasn’t about to settle for a floppy, flammable plastic tablecloth taped…
I was standing in the middle of our backyard in suburban Portland last August, holding a soggy piece of watermelon and watching my eleven-year-old, Maya, try to do a backflip into a three-foot-deep inflatable pool. It was a disaster. Not the backflip—she actually nailed that—but the sheer chaos of trying to find the right pool…
Last April 12, I found myself wrestling with a six-foot-tall popcorn bucket made entirely of movie night birthday balloons while my goldendoodle, Barnaby, tried to “help” by popping the butter-yellow ones. We were celebrating my nephew Leo’s fifth birthday here in Austin, and the humidity was doing zero favors for my static-cling strategy. It was…
