Feeding a four-year-old, a three-year-old, and a ten-month-old is basically the final boss of modern parenting. These kids are unpredictable, indecisive, and moody in ways that transcend the laws of nature. Some parents worry their toddlers might be “spirited.” Mine sometimes glow.
My husband works a perfectly normal IT job—commutes, meetings, the whole suburban package. He just also happens to be a wizard. A good one. Too good, honestly, because he passed those powers straight down to the children like some people pass down dimples. So while other families argue about who wants dinosaur-shaped nuggets, I’m over here negotiating with a preschooler whose emotions can literally short-circuit the microwave.
Snacks, of course, are the universal language. They’d live off pretzels, fruit snacks, and whatever mysterious crumbs they discover in their car seats. Meals, though? Meals require intention. A beginning, middle, and end. And toddlers—magical or not—do not believe in narrative structure.
But sometimes, miraculously, a dish lands. One night they inhale it like it’s the culinary equivalent of a unicorn sighting. I get hopeful. I get smug. I text my husband, We found the meal. The prophecy foretold this day.
So naturally, I make it again.
And the very next time, those same children look at the same food like it’s been cursed by a discount sorcerer on Craigslist. They pick at it. They shrug. They tell me, with heartbreaking casual cruelty, that they are “just not feeling it today.”
Which is devastating, because I made it for them—with intention, with love, and with the false hope of a mother who really thought she had hacked the system. But raising magical kids is like cooking in a house with unpredictable Wi-Fi: no matter how good everything looks, the connection can drop at any moment.
Here are the three meals I can usually count on—usually being the key word, because nothing in a magically-inclined household is ever truly reliable. Even the dishwasher occasionally develops opinions.
The most dependable dish in our lineup is mac and cheese. By “dependable,” I mean it doesn’t always cause a mutiny. Some nights they inhale it like they’ve been wandering the wilderness of the living room for days. Other nights they poke at it like it might lunge at them. But for reasons unknown to mortal science, this is the meal least likely to trigger a toddler spellstorm. I’ve watched a whole pot disappear so fast I wondered if one of the kids had opened a tiny portal under the table.
Chicken chili is my own favorite, which means I make it often enough that the kids have accepted it as part of the world’s natural order, like gravity or spilled water cups. They’ll eat it without complaint, which in toddler terms is basically a standing ovation. It’s warm, hearty, and—bonus—has only triggered one minor levitation incident, which is a record in this house.
Then there’s ramen. Not the packet kind from college days, though I do enjoy those, but the semi-homemade version that makes me feel like a responsible adult. We make our own broth, toss in veggies, add toppings, and then dramatically pretend the store-bought noodles complete the “artisanal process.” The kids actually enjoy it, though I keep hoping they’ll someday love it with the passion of an anime protagonist slurping noodles under neon lights. For now, they eat it, and no one has enchanted a meatball to orbit the ceiling fan during dinner, so I call that a win.
These meals aren’t perfect, but they get eaten—most of the time—and in a house where the children could theoretically set dinner on fire with a tantrum, that feels like genuine victory. There’s room to keep playing with the magic of this world in the next section, especially as you wrap up the post or move into your closing thoughts.
Witch, Please 
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