Claiming 45.

I wrote this on my birthday, July 28. I'm posting it tomorrow, on purpose. July 29th is Jupiter Cazimi in Leo, astrologers are calling it the luckiest day of the year, and something about that timing feels too aligned to ignore. I'm sealing this one in with the universe. Feet in the grass first, sun in my face, then hitting publish.

(And if I'm honest, I also just ran out of hours on my actual birthday — but I like the magic version better!)

I've visited Paul L. Dunbar Elementary dozens of times over the past few years — dropping off supplies, checking in with Principal Garret-Jones, delivering treats to each teacher via a “sunshine cart”. Every time, I feel it: real love, real community, from the faculty and staff who show up for those kids every day.

But if I'm honest, it's always been just me. I've never brought my own community into that space — my friends, my family, the people I love — until this year.

In May, on one of those visits, I stopped in front of the sensory boards lining the hallway. I'd patched them here and there over the years — a glue gun in my bag, an extra wiffle ball tucked in where one had gone missing. Little nip-tucks. But standing there that day, I really saw them. Worn. Busted. Loved to pieces, literally.

And I thought: these kids deserve better. And so do the people who've never gotten to see this place I love.

I pulled the first one off the wall before I'd even fully formed the plan. I filmed a little video in that hallway, not sure yet what it was for — just knowing something needed to happen. That video became the seed of everything that followed.

Here's what I knew: I had the summer. I had my community. And I had Stronger Together Dallas — a nonprofit my friend Cassie Braun and her family had quietly been building for a year, hosting family volunteer days out of their own home. That June, Cassie told me they were formalizing it — an official 501(c)3 — and asked me to join the board. I said yes before she finished the sentence.

So I brought two things together: a school I love, and a young organization just stepping into its own. I offered to host the first big official Stronger Together project at my house — pulling every sensory board off Dunbar's walls and rebuilding them, board by board, across my garage, patio, and backyard.

I won't pretend the planning was small. I don't do things small — but I also don't do them chaotic. I like to build the structure so other people get to be free inside it. That's one of my actual gifts, and this project needed it: Amazon wishlists, supply counts, an Instagram invitation to rally the community, zones mapped out by age and intensity — the garage as the cut-and-drill zone (parents required, tools respected), the driveway for glue-and-stick work, the library cart inside for the littlest kids with coloring and books.

I'll be honest about something else, too: I have a full-time job. In another season of my life, a project like this would have swallowed every spare hour I had — or I simply wouldn't have attempted it. This time, I built it in pockets. Dog walks. Weekend mornings. I used Claude — genuinely, like a project manager in my pocket — to help me organize supply lists from photos of the old boards, map out age-appropriate zones, and keep the whole plan moving without it eating my life. I think there's something worth saying here about what it means for nonprofits, for busy parents, for anyone doing mission-driven work on borrowed time: AI can be a real accelerant for good, not just for productivity — for the kind of good that used to require more hours than any of us actually have.

My goal was twelve or fourteen boards. We finished twenty-four.

The day itself was everything I hoped and more than I planned for. Kids and parents knee-deep together in sponges, sequins, gorilla glue, and staple guns — nobody performing, nobody on the sidelines.

My own family showed up fully: Jim spent the weekend on Home Depot runs and building the space alongside me — that was my birthday gift, exactly as I'd asked for. My daughter ran the library cart. My son took over the garage and built his own wiffle ball station. They each had something to own, and we didn't have to hover.

We see your brilliance, Bud.

One boy stood over his board mid-decision, hands thrown straight up in the air like he'd just solved something enormous. I caught it on camera completely by accident.

That's the whole day, really, in one frame.

Afterward — Jim and I standing in my kitchen with a couple of parents on cleanup duty (my friend Becca discovering her flip-flop had literally glued itself to her foot) — I had a realization I couldn't have planned for. This whole day had been Montessori in its purest form: I provided the structure and the materials, and the humans — kids and parents alike — chose what called to them.

Parents weren't just supervising; they were in it, picking their own colors, their own patterns, diving into the creativity right alongside their kids. When a task called for a parent's hand — the glue gun, the staple gun — the parent let the child lead it, rather than doing it for them. Some kids spent the whole afternoon perfecting one board. Others floated from station to station. A few mostly just ate snacks and watched, and that was fine too. Nobody was managed into participation. Everybody — grown-ups included — found their own way in.

The Montessori thread showed up in one more way I didn't expect.

Lexus, my kids' former Montessori teacher, and Tangela Levels, the school's director (and queen magic-maker)!, had planned to come and had to cancel last minute.

Instead of just sitting it out, they asked if they could take a board home (well, two!) That, to me, was the whole philosophy showing up in the grown-ups too: choose what calls to you, even from a distance.

Reflecting on the high of that weekend, another thought kept surfacing: why do I ever do any of this alone?

I go to Dunbar a handful of times each semester — checking in with the principal, dropping off supplies, running things over to the librarian. There's never been a reason for me to do that solo.

So I'm making a commitment, out loud, in writing:
every time I go, I'm bringing someone with me. A neighborhood friend. Someone curious about becoming a liaison themselves. Someone who just has an hour free and wants the company.

It doesn't have to be complicated.

Why not scoop up a friend for the drive over, talk in the car, let them see what a school visit even looks like? Nobody has to teach anybody anything. Every school, every principal, every relationship is different — but the togetherness doesn't have to be complicated to be real.

What would it look like if we stopped doing alone the things that were never meant to be solo in the first place?

This is how I chose to spend my birthday weekend. Not a quiet dinner, not a spa day — a backyard full of glue guns and kids and people I love, working toward something bigger than any one of us. And I got so much more out of it than the twenty-four boards we finished.

This year especially, I've chosen to be so intentional and to think about what my gifts actually are — and what I'm doing with them. Standing in the middle of all that color and noise and creativity, I realized: this is what it feels like when I'm working in my zone of genius.

Positivity. Woo (Winning Others Over). Belief.
Rallying people to a cause bigger than themselves. My energy is part of what drew people there in the first place — and once they showed up, I got to step back and let it be easy. Let them bring their own gifts. Let the day become more than anything I could have planned alone.

That's the version of myself I want to keep choosing. Not smaller. Not quieter. A bright light, shining for something worth shining for — and doing it together.

There's a line I love:

"Why be a star when you can make a constellation?"

I think that's what I'm claiming for 45 — not just the momentum of what's ahead, but the shape of it. Not one bright thing, standing alone. A whole sky of them, made brighter by being together.

So here's what I'm carrying out of this weekend and into this next year: the momentum of what's ahead. Drive in service of something bigger than me. Twenty-four boards, a new nonprofit's first big day, a school year that starts stronger — not because I did it alone, but because I never meant to. And that's exactly how I want to keep building.