Pants On Fire

Hubs and I take a lot of pride in being fairly honest people. In those rare cases where a fib is necessary, (like when the psycho from kijiji emails asking us where he can show up to pick up our free broken chair and murder us and we have to tell an untruth to save our skins), we both are generally quite awkward and concoct a colourful, minutely detailed story that's just so awesome people won't help but buy it. We go for the "It's So Unbelievable You Just Have To Believe It" approach. But in general, we are the kind of folks who won't hesitate to tell the truth at all times.

However, there is a huge, gaping exception. We lie to our kids ALL THE TIME. And the lies just roll off our tongues like warm maple syrup (which we are out of, wink wink). These are some of the most amusing lies I've noticed us telling the boys recently.

• Dreaming about falling over a waterfall means you're growing (this stupid dream kept plaguing B1 for weeks until we gave him this feel-good, if false explanation)
• There are no cookies in the pantry (technically true sometimes, they're often only in my belly - but I probably was hiding in the pantry when I ate them)
• Yes I'm going to bed now too (because otherwise they will each insist that I need to stay in their bed all night when I tuck them in)
• McDonald's is closed (does it ever close?)
• Oops, sorry, the grocery store bakery ran out of freebie cookies (that smell is just a special birthday cake that someone else ordered baking)
• We don't have money for that (because, yes, we are so tightly budgeted that your $1.47 bag of Skittles will put us into foreclosure)
• Drink up your Advil (and please don't notice that it's just water in the Advil dose cup)
• Today's going to be a No Yelling Day! (this is an unintentional lie...the No Yelling Day is always intended, rarely accomplished)

Should I be concerned that I can't think of more? Am I becoming a hardened, calloused liar? Are the lines between honestly and fibbery becoming so blurred that I can't even identify which side I'm on anymore?

No. Impossible. I will never lie to my kids again. (What's that burning-denim smell?)