Thursday, January 03, 2008

Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire!

All of my kids are unscrupulous liars. They have no problem with looking you square in the eyes and lying their asses off.

Don't get me wrong, they don't lie about everything. It's not like they come home and tell us that they just saw Superman riding the bus or anything like that. They only lie when they think they are going to get in trouble. Like, say, if they broke something or hit someone.

We have reached a point where you can't believe any of them. Your only hope of getting the truth is to ask all three individually. If you get the same answer from 2 out of three then the chances are that this is the truth. Thankfully they haven't figured out the art of framing their sisters for their own crimes. Yet.

At the present time I think that #3 is the biggest liar in the house. However it is impossible for me to be sure. #1 and #2 might lie just as much or more. After all they have been doing it a lot longer. Maybe they have me fooled. I can't tell. I don't know what to think anymore.

I do know that, as of age 5, #3 is becoming quite the little expert.

She is so convincing with her deceptions. She has learned that simply blaming someone else doesn't work nearly as well as pleading ignorance. When confronted with a potentially damning question all she knows is that she doesn't know anything.

Who did this? I don't know.
What happened to that? I don't know.
Who put this in there? I don't know.
How did this get covered in that? I don't know.

It's the perfect defense. She doesn't give anything away.

If you try to just outright blame her for something she is incredibly convincing with her denial. This kid should be an actress.

Here is a perfect example from the holidays:

The day after Christmas we got a locking doorknob for #1's bedroom. It was not so that she could have privacy or anything like that. It was a necessary measure to protect the stuff she just got for Christmas. You see, our house is not only filled with liars, it is also full of thieves and vandals. #2 and #3 have a long history of going into #1's bedroom and wrecking her stuff (I'm glad I'm not the only one that this happens to).

This year #1 got a lot of good stuff. A Nintendo DS, a jewelry box, a TV and so on. All of these things would be lost, stolen and broken before school was back in if they weren't locked up. So for the safety of her things we got a lock.

I took the new doorknob upstairs and set everything down on #1's bed and set about the installation procedure. As with every handyman job, it required a number of trips from the upstairs down to the basement to get some forgotten tool. Anyway the doorknob got installed and I was making sure it all worked before I shut the door. Everything seemed to be in order. I just had to do one last check. Lock the door and make sure the key unlocks it. It sure would suck to lock it, close the door and find out the key didn't work.

I went to get the keys and there they were, gone. I looked all over the bed. I shook out the blankets. I looked on the floor around the bed. I checked between the bed and the wall. I almost wore out my pockets from checking them so many times. I checked downstairs. Basically I looked everywhere.

I then came to the conclusion that someone must have 'lifted' them when I wasn't looking. My first suspect was #3 because she is also a thief. I approached her and asked if she took them. She denied it. She denied it so well that I believed her and ransacked the house yet again looking for the key. Then I asked #3 again. "Are you sure you don't have the keys?" Again an emphatic denial.

I was positive that she MUST have taken them but she seemed so genuine with her denial.

My parents were over when all of this was going on. I told my Mom that I suspected that #3 took the keys but she wasn't fessing up. She took #3 upstairs to ask her in a nice Grandma way if she had the keys. I was standing right there when #3 walked into the hallway and came back with keys in hand.

What a dirty, rotten liar!

I don't know what bothers me the most, the lies or the fact that I fall for their lies.

What a Gulli-Bull!

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