The scent of Tiger Balm and expensive craft IPA hung heavy in my Austin backyard last February when my best friend Mike finally earned his third-degree black belt. Most people think of tiny humans in oversized white pajamas when they hear the word karate, but Mike’s “Black Belt & Brews” bash was strictly for the…
Living in Chicago with twins means two things: you learn to love the wind and you learn to stretch a dollar until it screams. My twins, Leo and Maya, turned nine on July 12th, 2025, and I had exactly $60 in my pocket to make their backyard carnival dreams come true. I felt the pressure…
My kitchen floor was covered in three different types of black tape, and my youngest, Leo, who just turned four, was currently trying to chew on a plastic checkered flag. This was May 14, 2024. I was exactly twenty-seven minutes away from eighteen energetic 9-year-olds descending on our suburban Portland home for Sam’s birthday. I…
My living room looked like a pink hand grenade had gone off in a chocolate factory. There I was, a thirty-eight-year-old single dad in the middle of Atlanta, knee-deep in crinkled streamers and half-eaten cupcakes, wondering how my life became a quest for the best peppa pig party supplies. It wasn’t supposed to be this…
My living room looked like a pink grenade had detonated in a craft store. Glitter clung to the ceiling fans. I found a stray sequin in my coffee three days later. Being a single dad in Atlanta means you learn fast, or you drown in tulle and tears. My daughter, Maya, turned three on March…
Last Tuesday, my living room in Denver looked like a rainbow exploded, specifically a rainbow owned by a billionaire toddler named JJ. I stood there, clutching a lukewarm coffee, watching nineteen ten-year-old boys try to wear toddler-sized hats while unironically singing about vegetable songs. My son, Leo, had decided for his tenth birthday that “ironic…
Leo stared at me with those wide, three-year-old eyes on the morning of March 12, 2024, and simply whispered, “Pika?” I knew right then that my weekend was gone. Living in Denver, you’d think finding pokemon birthday treat bags would be as easy as spotting a Subaru in a grocery store parking lot, but the…
March 12, 2024, was a cold, slushy Tuesday in Chicago, but inside our basement, we were preparing for a literal lift-off. My twins, Leo and Maya, were turning seven, and they had decided—with the unwavering authority only a first-grader possesses—that they needed an intergalactic bash. My bank account, however, was still recovering from a surprise…
My living room looked like a glitter bomb went off in a freezer last January when my middle child, Lily, turned five. If you live in Portland, you know that January is basically three hundred days of grey drizzle, so we decided to lean hard into the “winter wonderland” vibe to keep from losing our…
The smell of salt air was actually just a $12 “Ocean Breeze” candle burning in my kitchen while I frantically tried to duct tape a soggy cardboard sun back together, but in my head, we were at the Maldives instead of Lake Travis. It was June 14, 2025, and my niece Maya was turning eight….
