The living room looked like a glitter bomb hit a Limited Too store, and honestly, I wasn’t even mad about it. My oldest, Maya, just turned 11, and she decided her entire personality this year is “Millennium Chic,” which is hilarious because I actually lived through the first one with a Nokia 3310 and a…
My kitchen table currently looks like a pink explosion went off in a stationery factory. Lily, my eight-year-old, is hunched over a stack of envelopes with the focus of a diamond cutter, her tongue poking out slightly as she navigates the tricky curves of a capital ‘S’. We just wrapped up her birthday bash here…
The humidity in Houston during April is no joke, and neither is trying to decorate a classroom for seventeen nearly-teenagers while staying under a ninety-dollar budget. My classroom usually looks like a hurricane hit a craft store by Friday afternoon, but on April 12, 2024, it was specifically a blue and orange hurricane. I had…
My living room looked like a Pepto-Bismol bottle exploded in a glitter factory last August. It was August 14, 2025, a Tuesday that felt like a decade, because my oldest, Maya, was turning 11. She informed me, with all the gravity of a middle-schooler-to-be, that her “Barbie Era” was transitioning into “Malibu Glamping.” I had…
Twenty-two second-graders in a Houston classroom produce a specific kind of hum that sounds exactly like a hive of bees on caffeine, and by the time April rolls around, I usually need a stiff drink and a very quiet room. Last spring, though, I didn’t get the quiet room; I got the task of planning…
I am the kind of dad who reads the fine print on a box of crayons. Last year, my son Leo turned nine, and he decided his bedroom walls weren’t enough; he needed the entire solar system. Finding the best party favors for space party setups shouldn’t feel like rocket science, but I spent four…
I still smell stale pepperoni and synthetic fog machine juice when I look at the pictures from last fall. Throwing a Five Nights at Freddy’s themed birthday bash for my nephew Leo’s 5th birthday was an absolute fever dream. Yes, five. Do not ask me why a kindergartener is obsessed with haunted, malfunctioning animatronic bears….
Nothing humbles a man quite like standing on a shaky stepstool in a Denver basement, trying to tape 48 individual squares of lime-green cardstock to a concrete wall while nine eight-year-olds scream about “creepers” in the next room. I thought I was prepared for Leo’s 8th birthday yesterday, April 18, 2026. I had the snacks,…
Popcorn kernels always find a way into my shoes. Last March 12, 2024, I hosted our annual “End of Year Carnival” for 22 energetic second-graders in my Houston classroom, and the chaos started before the first bell even rang. My floor was a sea of red and white stripes, and by 10:00 AM, my teaching…
My living room floor in Logan Square looked like a robot war zone by 3:00 PM last Saturday. Blue and red foil shards caught the afternoon light, glinting off the rug while eighteen four-year-olds screamed at the top of their lungs. I sat on the edge of the sofa, clutching a lukewarm coffee, and realized…
