My living room looked like a pirate ship exploded in it last August 14th, and honestly, I wasn’t even mad about it. Leo was turning three, and in my suburban Portland neighborhood, birthdays are basically an Olympic sport, though I usually prefer the “survive and advance” strategy. I was standing there with a glue gun…
I stood in my sister’s backyard in East Austin on April 12, 2025, sweating through my “NASA Mom” t-shirt while trying to convince a golden retriever that he wasn’t actually an alien. Leo was turning two. Eighteen toddlers were descending upon us in exactly forty-five minutes, and the “space station” I built from refrigerator boxes…
My kitchen counter currently looks like a glitter bomb went off in a craft store, and honestly, that is just my life now. It was October 12, 2024, when I realized I had committed to the impossible task of creating the perfect bluey crown for kids for Sophie’s 5th birthday party here in rainy Portland….
Teaching third grade for fifteen years means I have seen every possible variation of the “birthday meltdown.” I have cleaned glitter out of floor cracks that have been sealed since the Eisenhower administration. Last March, specifically March 14, 2025, my niece Lily decided her tenth birthday had to be a “Metamorphosis Magic” theme. I found…
Sitting on my living room floor in Wicker Park last Tuesday, I realized I was covered in pink glitter and smelling faintly of lukewarm apple juice. My twins, Maya and Leo, had just turned six on March 14, 2026, and after hosting sixteen screaming kindergartners on a $53 budget, I felt like I’d finished a…
My living room smelled like burnt sugar and desperate hope on October 12, 2025. I stood there, a single dad in the middle of Atlanta, staring at a lopsided chocolate cake that looked less like a rustic desert landscape and more like a mudslide in the Blue Ridge Mountains. My son Sam was turning ten….
Twenty-two second graders stared at me with the intensity of a thousand suns while “Baby Shark” blasted from my laptop speakers for the fourteenth time that morning. It was April 12, 2025, and I was deep in the trenches of our annual “Spring Shark Social” here in Houston. My classroom rug was already covered in…
Maya stood in the middle of our Austin living room on April 12, 2024, staring at a pile of primary-colored streamers with the kind of intense focus usually reserved for TikTok transitions. She was turning twelve. Twelve is a weird age where you want to be a “teenager” but you also secretly still want to…
The kitchen island looked like a glitter bomb had detonated right next to a stack of parchment paper, and I was frantically trying to hot-glue 13 individual “phoenix feather” cores into chopsticks before my twins, Leo and Maya, woke up at 6:00 AM on their eighth birthday. It was October 14, 2025, and I had…
Twenty-four nine-year-olds in a humid Houston backyard sounds like a recipe for a migraine, yet here I was last March trying to pull off a budget moana party for 9 year old Maya without spending my entire mortgage. Being a third-grade teacher means I spend my days managing chaos, but nothing prepares you for the…
