Good moms let their basketball-loving kids watch March Madness games, but one great mom set the bar much higher with her young son. Kate Strickler spent eight hours turning her dining room wall into a giant bracket for the spring NCAA basketball tournament. She wanted to create a “wow” moment for her nine-year-old, Johnny, who is outnumbered by his three little sisters.
Kate completed the project while he was at school, so he was surprised with it when he came home that afternoon. “Getting the first part right was harder than it looks,” she admits, sharing that she started measuring as soon as her kids left for school and barely finished before they got home. The mom had to enlist help from her husband Nate to get all the teams on the wall in time.
While it was a lot of work, Johnny’s huge smile made it all worth it. "There’s few and far between moments where you do something in parenting that you put in a lot of effort and the response matches the effort," Kate says. "When you have those moments, it is just so overly rewarding. And that is what this felt like." The first March Madness bracket went up last year and it was such a hit, they did it again this year, but Johnny got to help this time and the mom says it was “so much more fun because we did it together.”
Source: Today