Welcome to Edit Your Life, a podcast to help you edit the unnecessary from your life so you have more room to enjoy the awesome.

Through episodes with me, Christine Coe, and a range of smart, compassionate guests, you will come away with insights and tactics to help you find the agency in space to simplify

and declutter your home, time, mental space, and more.

Hello, friends.

Oh my goodness.

I'm feeling a little nostalgic.

My Laurel just turned 20.

20.

And my violet is 13. 13. Where does the time go? And so this nostalgia is why I wanted to roll

it back and talk about simplifying and evolving birthday celebrations. It's so interesting

to think about the scope of experience across generations, which is the kind of thinking I do all the time.

When I was a kid, we never had friend parties.

I think part of this was cultural.

My parents were immigrants from Korea and were highly skeptical of American things like Halloween and school buses, much less letting kids

you don't even know into your home. Part of it, of course, was financial. We were a very

needs-not-wants type of household, and things were always tough. So the idea of a birthday party where you invite all these people that you

don't know and spend all this money was just not happening. And also I think part of it was that

our household was already so large. We had seven kids, two parents, and either grandparents

or other immigrating relatives in the house at any given time. So it felt

plenty crowded. Now, I will say with great humility that when Laurel was little, I definitely

tried to overcompensate. I had so many issues. Overcompensation was my massive kryptonite when I became a parent.

When I think back to it now, her birthdays feel absurd. Her first three birthdays, of which

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