The old adage says silence is golden, but any parent knows the truth: silence is suspicious. Silence is an invoice owed for five minutes of peace. In a home with four kids, you learn to speak a second language: the language of distant sounds.

This language has dialects. If my oldest is in the kitchen and I hear the fridge open, it’s a whisper of pride. She’s actually making her own food! If my preschooler is in the kitchen and I hear that same sound…well, let’s just say I immediately make two phone calls: one to a disaster cleanup specialist, and another to a fumigator for the lost piece of cheese we will undoubtedly locate by smell in three weeks. It’s just good to get on contractors’ schedules early.

Of all the distant sounds, the most terrifying is no sound at all.

A couple of weeks ago, we were enjoying a perfect day. To be clear, I mean perfect weather. I’m a parent of four, I gave up on “perfect days” eight years ago. I’m just happy if all kids make it to bed in roughly the same condition they started in. The weather was beautiful, the windows were open, and all screens were off. It was peaceful. I took the opportunity to lay back on the couch and just soak it in.

Then I bolted upright. This peaceful moment wasn’t natural. I couldn’t hear anything. No screaming, no vrooming cars, no sibling arguments. It was silent.

I quickly scanned the room and found my oldest on the floor reading a book. That tracks. But where were the other two? Just into the other room, I found my first clue. At the bottom of the stairs was a small pile of purple Kinetic Sand. As an experienced parent, I’m no longer a victim of chaos. I’m a forensic analyst of it. This pile of Kinetic Sand was a mere calling card left by some cocky kids unafraid of consequences.  

I followed the evidence, and the next steps revealed a disturbingly consistent sprinkle pattern up the stairs and into the main hallway. From there, the entire hallway was covered in speckles of sand. In the bathroom, purple sand littered the sink, tub and toilet. The more I looked, the more I found. Every single nook and cranny was bedazzled with purple. Even the dressers in their room. Every. Single. Drawer. Each one had a healthy dose of sand sprinkled all over their clothes.

I was able to triangulate the sand pattern to the playroom where my four-year-old and six-year-old were playing quietly. An empty bag of kinetic sand sat innocently beside them.

I couldn’t speak. I was furious, of course, but in a way that only happens to parents, the anger quickly melted into something resembling exhaustion. My fury was instantly crushed by the sheer weight of the cleanup. This wasn’t a Saturday afternoon job. This was a multi-year sentence. I’ll still be finding this purple sand in the lint trap of the dryer in 2027. I’ll find it inside a snow boot next January. This freaking sand will outlive my mortgage.

That’s when a strange third emotion crept in: I was impressed. It was amazing, really, how they had so delicately distributed a single bag of sand across the entire house. The coverage was immaculate and the physics, well, they were impossible. 

And that’s when I realized this wasn’t an act of children. It was an act of God. Like when Jesus fed the 5,000, this was divine intervention. An angel of the Lord had visited my home and miraculously multiplied this small finite supply of sand to bless every corner of our house. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

I took my two little banshees on a walking tour of the house, the parenting equivalent of rubbing a dog’s nose in an accident. Those little boogers had the nerve to act like they were seeing it for the first time, playing up their shock and marveling at the completeness of the coverage.

After the tour came the reckoning, and I stood at the typical post-disaster crossroads every parent faces. I could either spend the next three hours “coaching” them through the proper way to hold a vacuum without causing further damage. Or I could do it all myself and preserve what little sanity I had left.

Ultimately, I chose my sanity. As I pushed the vacuum across the sand-speckled floor, it sunk in that my moment of rest came at a price. When kids are involved, silence is never golden. 

In my house, silence is purple.