Daddy is a SUCKER

But he can be taught!

Alright, background, we've had a rough go with lying in the house.  Particularly the ten year old and the seven year old but today lets talk about the ten year old.

About a month ago when Kent did allowance for the kids, I had him give me an extra three dollars for Ean's classroom party fee.  Ean remained the one child that I hadn't paid and I wanted to get that done.  This was Sunday, inconveniently right before church but that is a whole 'nother blog post!

Monday morning I forgot to send the funds with Ean and I remembered after dinner that night so I went to my desk to get it taken care of, so Ean could take it the next day.

Gone.

Nothing.

Of course first thing I did was check piggy banks because if it was one of the twins, that's where it would go.  Each only owned a few dollars, so it was not them.  Asked Ean, he said he had his own money, WHY would he take someone elses????  He was very indignant too.

That left the ten year old.

Now we have a long history of lying, denying, especially when cornered, so I decided I needed back up and called Kent into the kitchen before getting the tween.  When both were there, I confronted Kate and of course she immediately went into denial mode.  There was shrieking, yelling, righteous indignation "I didn't take it OKAY!"  My problem is that I have heard it all before and later found out she was guilty.

I was not fooled in the least.  After several minutes, I finally told the child that I was searching her room and the reason I didn't believe her was because she had lied so often in the past.

After several minutes, I did indeed find the missing money and she knew she was caught and we dealt with it.  As a parenting note, we've already had the "Can't trust your word, have to earn your trust again and this can only happen with 100% honestly" several times.

To my complete shock I found out the other day that my tween had her daddy convinced that she innocent that day.  He was snookered, hook, line and sinker.

I am very very glad that I called him that day as back up because obviously he hadn't seen THE PERFORMANCE, that I've endured far to many time to count.

I'd like to note that the moral is, be a united front in front of the kid.  I mean, Kent certainly thought I was maligning his daughters character, but he let it play out and if I had been off base we would have talked about it later.  Away from the tween.

Unfortunately I was right.  Sometimes a mother doesn't want to be right.

Hopefully we're on the road to respecting ourselves enough to make better choices.  It is very hard to grow up.  And daddy has learned a little too.