It started out with a series of lies. Bald-faced lies. Lies where he thinks I am too stupid to figure them out because his perspective on the world is so narrow… that he can’t fathom there is stuff outside his realm of understanding. Therefore, if he doesn’t know it, *I* don’t know it either.

WRONG, KID. Your mom is no genius, but she does know some stuff.

So. We sit down and talk about the difference between lies and imagination. Serious talk. Because the last thing I want to do is squash his imagination. But I also want him to stop lying about trivial things like what he had for lunch, because, HELLO, I can look that up online and I know they are not serving you SALAD WITH CHICKEN, BEEF, BEANS AND FISH! This IS a school lunch we are talking about! On a school budget! And if they ARE serving you that, I want to talk to them about how my tax dollars are being spent because that’s just NASTY.

So, Declan proceeds to paint with water colors while I fix dinner. I walk back into the living room, and he is STANDING on his art table, wiping at the wall.

I don’t know about your house, but this does not happen in my house. My kid doesn’t even get on the couch with his shoes on. “What exactly are you doing, sir?”

And then I notice there is water all over the wall, all over my framed artwork on said wall, dribbling down the wall and that Declan is looking really scared.

I try to stay calm. I ask what happened. Thinking maybe he dropped something heavy in his water cup and it flew up on the wall. He gives me several conflicting and equally lame excuses. Finally he admits that he flung the water up on the wall himself. Why? He has no idea.

HOLEE. BIG. TROUBLE.

Now, I know the line about “kids being kids”… and in retrospect, the whole thing is pretty funny – but at the time I started wondering if I could bundle him off to a work camp in eastern Russia. Sometimes, when you have a kid who rarely acts up, it’s worse when they do.

So, he had a long time-out and we talked some more about how doing things you know are wrong will get you in trouble – but lying about it means DOUBLE TROUBLE.

And when I say trouble, I mean TROUBLE. As in, I made him call his father at the office and tell him what he had done. That was, let’s just say, difficult for him and Bryan mostly got a lot of sobbing on his end of the conversation.

Then we had peace for about 5 seconds. Then 3 more lies in quick succession. My favorite being, “Mama, look at this bruise I got on my leg today! It bled a ton at school today.”

By then I LOST IT. Plain and simple. Lost. It. My voice was raised, I was ticked, and I was ready to teach this kid a few things about life. “DECLAN! What’s are you doing?! BRUISES DO NOT BLEED! Why did you just lie about that??!!?”

“I don’t know.”

I hate that line.

After I calmed down I tried to explain AGAIN what I meant about lies and imagination. We don’t lie. I don’t care what other kids do. That’s them. This is us. Our family does NOT lie to each other or anyone else. Imagination is for stories, drawings, songs, playtime. Telling the truth is for when we are talking about our day, having conversations, or anything that really happened. Got it? Good. Love you, good night.

And I ran out of the room before he could tell another lie.

But as Bryan and I talked about it later, we realized something. Both of us, but Bryan especially, are complete and utter smart alecks.

You remember in the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, how the Dad was alway making up crazy stuff to mess with Calvin? Replace Dad with Bryan, and Calvin with Declan.

It was like a lightbulb went off.

So, over the Thanksgiving weekend, we had more chats with Declan, and talked about how Dad likes to tease and how that might be confusing him, and how we understand this lying thing might be an extension of that. Bryan promised to try to make it more apparent to Declan – by winking – when he is teasing and help him understand when and where it is appropriate to make fun, and when we need to tell the truth.

Bryan’s eye has been a little sore this week from all the winking – but it is definitely helping. Declan is getting it. He is asking things like – “are you teasing?” And starting conversations with, “this is just a made-up story.”

Sarcasm, teasing and made-up stuff… and how to tell when your parents are being a smart aleck… are such hard concepts, ones we didn’t even think we would have the actually “teach.”

How do you deal with it when your kid(s) lie to you?