Do you trust your instincts?

By the time you have three children, you learn to wake up fast. Not gracefully—just fast. Like an animal on the savannah that hears grass rustle wrong. That’s how this particular morning began: with the sharp jolt of something sizzling in the distance.

Not bacon. Not eggs. It was the kind of sizzling that made my skin prickle, the kind that said something in this house is doing something it should absolutely not be doing.

The hallway was dim and quiet except for that faint, crackling sound. I could smell lavender—warm, sweet, slightly metallic. Lavender is never a good sign here. Lavender means magic is building somewhere. Lavender means one of my children is experimenting. Lavender means the fire extinguisher should be visible.

I stepped into Tara’s room, ready for anything except what I found.

My ten-month-old daughter hovered gently above her crib mattress, spinning in small, dreamy circles. Her chubby legs bicycled slowly in the air. A soft violet halo pulsed around her like she was lit from inside.

She giggled—loud, delighted, unaware that gravity was something other babies obeyed.

“Adam,” I called, but quietly, because you don’t want to startle a floating infant.

He appeared with a mug of coffee, his hair sticking up, eyes still soft with sleep. He took in the scene, nodded once. “She’s channeling ambient energy.”

I turned to him. “Is she supposed to channel ambient energy?”

“Eventually,” he said, as if “eventually” covered everything from tying shoes to astral projection.

Before I could demand a more specific timeline, a different scent cut through the lavender: grape jelly. Thick, sugary, and suspiciously strong. I didn’t even have to speak. Adam just sighed in a way that said, You already know the answer.

“James and Sophie,” I muttered.

Following the jelly trail felt like following breadcrumbs through a very sticky fairytale. Purple footprints dotted the floor—some small, some smeared sideways as if someone had tried to moonwalk through a spill.

The pantry door was cracked open.

Inside, James stood on a stool, jar of jelly in one hand, long wooden spoon in the other. His pajamas were polka-dotted with purple fingerprints. He looked up slowly, like he’d been caught mid-heist.

“I know this looks bad,” he said.

“Why is the jelly out?” I asked.

“We needed something squishy and purple,” he said seriously. “Sophie said jelly is the squishiest purple.”

This was… not wrong.

Sophie popped out from behind a cereal box, curls frizzed out in all directions, her hands coated in a sparkling mixture of jelly and glitter. “We’re making Clark brave,” she said.

“The cat,” I clarified, in case someone had been swapped overnight.

“Yes,” she said, nodding with great gravitas. “He’s scared of monsters.”

“Maybe,” I said, “because monsters live here?”

She shrugged, as if that was a minor obstacle.

Clark himself made his entrance with perfect timing. Sleek black fur, golden eyes, attitude of a creature who has lived several lifetimes and is unimpressed by all of them.

He sat down neatly and surveyed the room. “You know,” he said, “for a household with two capable adults, things get out of hand remarkably fast.”

I pointed at him. “Do not move. They’re trying—”

“NOW!” Sophie shouted before I finished.

James thrust the spoon forward with the confidence of a child who has never once considered consequences.

A bright violet spark shot out, zipped across the tiny space, and smacked Clark directly in the chest.

There was a moment—a long, heavy moment—where nothing happened.

Then everything happened.

Clark let out a sound that can only be described as a war cry. He launched straight up, claws extended, landing halfway up the curtains like a tiny, furious mountaineer. He leapt from the curtains to the top of the fridge, overshot the fridge entirely, bounced off a cabinet door, and sprinted through the kitchen like a creature who had just found religion and decided to fight it.

James clapped. “He’s not scared at all!”

“No,” I managed. “He’s somewhere past bravery. This is… cosmic chaos.”

Adam finally wandered in, taking a sip from his mug. “Ah,” he said, watching Clark attempt to body-slam the toaster. “The courage spell worked.”

“Define worked,” I said.

He crouched beside Clark’s current battlefield—a toppled paper towel roll—and muttered a grounding charm under his breath. Soft gold light rippled outward like someone exhaling peace into the room.

Clark froze. Blinked. Lowered his claws.

“Did I,” he said, blinking again, “challenge the toaster?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That toaster had it coming,” he muttered, trying to salvage dignity as he padded toward the couch.

We cleaned—the jelly, the glitter, the fear-based sweat. Tara stopped glowing long enough to latch onto Adam’s hair. James tried to reenact the spell on a spoon to show me “where it went right.” Sophie insisted she felt the magic “tingle in her bones.”

And somewhere in all of this, through the absurdity and panic and affection and fatigue, I realized something important.

I can’t predict magic. I can’t sense spells building or tell when a charm is about to misfire. I don’t have a wand. I don’t have that innate magical pulse Adam seems to live in.

But I do have instincts.

They’re flawed and late and sometimes whisper completely unhelpful things—but they’re mine. They lead me down the hallway when something sizzles. They help me find my children in a house full of hiding places. They warn me—very reliably—when silence becomes suspicious.

And that’s enough.

We survived the morning. Clark calmed down. The toaster lives. Tara eventually drifted gently back into gravity’s jurisdiction and took an excellent nap.

As for me—my instincts told me to write it all down. Not because I have answers, but because the chaos is whole and strange and worth sharing. And because something tells me this was not the last time someone in this house will glow, fly, or attempt to magically “improve” the cat.

Instincts don’t have to be perfect. They just have to keep you going long enough to see what happens next.

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