Kid Magic Is Easier to Tolerate When You Remember That It Runs in the Family — Everyone’s Family

When my kids were younger they were fans of the Magic Treehouse series of books, which center on a young brother and sister, Jack and Annie, who stumble upon a treehouse that a) is filled with a library’s worth of its own books, and b) doubles as a fully equipped time-travel machine. You know — your typical backyard treehouse, like the one my own dad cobbled together out of old two-by-fours in the garage.

In the first book of the series, Jack cracks open one of the volumes he finds in the treehouse library — a guide on dinosaurs — and off-handedly wishes aloud that he could visit the place and time he sees in the pictures. All of a sudden, boom! Jack and Annie are instantly transported to Dinosaur World, and they spend the rest of the book trying to make their way back home.

Repeat this basic theme for several dozen similar books and you’ve got the Magic Treehouse series down pat. It’s actually pretty good stuff. It must be. Author Mary Pope Osborne has sold more than 130 million copies in the series so far.

But it’s so yesterday.

My own kids have things way better in real life. Why imagine yourself trudging all the way outside — to a fictional magic treehouse — when you can simply stroll a few feet each day into your very own, genuinely authentic Magic Kitchen?

The Magic Kitchen is a place of wonder, so magically magical that it seems to defy all logic. Skeptics might say that it isn’t magic at all. But I know it is, because I’ve seen it. And the kids don’t even have to see it to believe it.

Extraordinary things happen in the Magic Kitchen.

In the Magic Kitchen, bread closes itself and puts on its own annoying plastic tabs to stay shut. And it does all of this after floating from the counter under its own power and placing itself gently in the fridge.

In the Magic Kitchen, banana and orange peels walk themselves from the table or the counter to the garbage can. So do egg shells, the cellophane from newly opened peanut butter containers, empty cereal boxes and wrappers, and spent Kleenexes — although a few of the Kleenexes still need some practice, apparently, because the most independent among them can only make their way to the floor in front of the garbage can and not quite in.

In the Magic Kitchen, oatmeal and cereal dishes from breakfast rinse themselves without the need to be sandblasted clean by a human hours later following petrification (of the oatmeal and the cereal, not the human — usually). The same is true of maple syrup-covered plates.

In the Magic Kitchen, gobs of peanut butter, honey, granola, yogurt, applesauce, hot sauce, salad dressing, and salsa wash themselves free from the counter, and the table, and the stove, and the microwave, and the floor, and the sink.

In the Magic Kitchen, dish cloths and towels flutter from their equally magical gathering places on every available counter and dance all the way downstairs to the laundry room, pirouetting the entire way while music from “The Nutcracker Suite” fills the air. They then leap into the washer and then to the dryer — not at all sitting in a smelly pile for days on end — before they fold themselves and dance back to their drawer, where they remain neatly organized until the entire process repeats itself mere seconds after their return.

In the Magic Kitchen, stray raisins, almonds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and other escapees from the homemade trail mix march in formation from the floor underneath the counter to the floor by the garbage can — no doubt to hang out with the rogue Kleenexes there, because it’s a lonely life being food … or a Kleenex — before eventually rappelling up a small rope into the garbage can itself.

In the Magic Kitchen, remnants of raw eggs wipe themselves free from the counter and are not discovered days or weeks later under the strategically placed electric mixer. Nor are they transformed into a trail of clear blood-spatter evidence leading from the floor underneath the counter to — where else? — the floor in front of the garbage can.

In the Magic Kitchen, food particles and leftovers of all kinds evaporate and do not solidify and become part of the floor itself. Nor are they tracked throughout the kitchen and into the rest of the house, hitching a ride on someone’s feet or socks so that they can become a part of future randomly distributed cat vomit.

Yea, in the oh so magical Magic Kitchen, the dishwasher is powerful enough to penetrate clean through plastic. No need to actually remove those pesky snap-on lids from the salad dressing containers. Just throw the whole works in as is and, poof, the goo inside will be gone.

It’s magic.

It’s not magic, actually. In fact, there’s a ring of familiarity to it all, combined with a hazy but still quite comforting sense of solidarity — a vague, yet sustaining suspicion that I am somehow not the only one. A realization that, if I’m wise enough to actually go ahead and realize it, eases the daily frustration that tops the job description of Parent.

Oh yeah. Now I’m remembering.

When I was a young lad, my parents had a Magic Kitchen too.

Or we kids did, at least.

In that Magic Kitchen, chocolate chips went on permanent day trips through small holes in the Tollhouse bag — manufacturer’s error, no doubt — until only a fourth of the bag remained when Mom went to bake cookies. She was then completely fooled by the small piece of Scotch tape that magically appeared to repair the hole, and she didn’t ever come to realize that most of the chocolate chips had magically gone AWOL.

In that Magic Kitchen, the Caramel Nips candies that Mom hid so hopefully in a drawer — so she could have some little joy during her long night shifts as a nurse — would magically turn into carefully rewrapped little containers of air, courteous enough to crawl back into the box for later, um, consumption.

In that Magic Kitchen, knives enveloped in crystallized Cheez Whiz washed themselves clean by simply immersing themselves for several nanoseconds in soapy water, then being strategically placed under plates in the rinsed-dish holder. No need for scraping or scrubbing. Back then everything was automated.

In that Magic Kitchen, dust and dirt and crumbs and food scraps and pet fur found their own way to the garbage can and were not merely swept under the fridge, only to be discovered months — or years — later in the form of a small organic farm that was far ahead of its time.

In that Magic Kitchen, orange juice, apple juice, white milk, and especially chocolate milk were consumed without the inconvenient dirtying of actual cups. Similarly, cans of store-bought cake frosting were consumed without the inconvenient dirtying of actual knives — or the even more inconvenient waiting for the appearance of actual cake.

In that Magic Kitchen, certain appalling materials that my parents referred to as “food” conveniently fell off of our plates, made a temporary stop underneath said plates, magically landed on strategic nooks within the folded-up leaf underneath the table’s surface, and then magically rolled down our pantlegs to the waiting snout of our dog Skipper, who magically disposed of them safely, quickly, and, most crucial of all, without leaving a trail of damning evidence.

In fact, in a closely related legendary moment that was mythically magic by even this Magic Kitchen’s high standards, my brother Mike’s piece of liver once magically floated clear across the room on a cushion of air and alit in the nearby china cabinet, where it was anything but magically discovered by my poor sister Kathy more than a decade later in Grandma Kay’s antique butter dish, still fully intact and having lost none of its showroom sheen.

Now that’s magic.

It’s not magic, actually. None of it is.

It’s genetic.

Peter Vogt

I’m a writer. An essayist, to be more exact. I tell stories here—true stories, from my own life, in hopes they will make a positive difference in yours.

I share laughs and tears, insights and observations, frustrations and realizations, relying all the while on the storytelling wisdom of Julia Cameron, author of The Right to Write.

It is a great paradox that the more personal, focused, and specific your writing becomes, the more universally it communicates.