Liar Liar

As Isabella’s language skills continue to develop, we’re starting to tighten up and become serious about certain things that have no place in our household. One such no-no is lying.

Isabella is very strong willed (I guess that’s how you say it nicely and in a positive tone. One can also describe it as hard-headed and stubborn!). Her strong will is unfortunately accompanied by very bad judgment. Now she’s still very young and we cannot be sure this is going to get worse as she continues to grow, but this is the time to set the tone. Later it will be too late.

She’s quite sneaky and will try to get around any situation to achieve her goal. You tell her not to do something; she’ll wait and do it anyway when you’re not watching. Or worse still, she re-phrases in her own words what she’s not going to do, making you believe her even more as you think “wow, she’s really getting it!”. Then she blatantly does it anyway behind your back, thinking she’s gotten you sacked as you lower your guard. Poor little thing…she thinks she can outsmart us!

Last week she wore a watch to school and never came back home with it. So we told her she’s not allowed to take anything to school with her. She got the watch back at least and yesterday she sat on the couch by me, stuffing a toy purse in her backpack ready for Monday. Lori hid this purse from her for doing something wrong on another occasion and she was excited to get it back yesterday. In it she had some toy makeup like lip gloss and a toy cell phone. Anyway as I’m seeing her doing it, I said, “Isabella, remember that we said you’re not allowed to take toys to school”, and she immediately goes, “Ok, I’ll take it out”. She proceeds to take it out and saying “No toys to school”. She continued sitting by me watching Ratatouille with her backback and purse in her lap.

After some time, she gets up with both of them and runs in the game area. I immediately knew what was going to happen, so wanting to give her a chance to reconsider her actions, I asked her what she’s doing. She said she’s putting them back and I made sure to reinforce her words and said “Ok, make sure to put them both back over there.” She came running back and sat down. So I got up and said “are you sure you left the purse out?” and she says “Yes”. However as I got up and started walking towards them, she tried to outrun me. I got to the backpack and immediately knew what she did as the purse was nowhere to be seen and the backpack was a bit too fat ;) So there goes Lie #1.

That made me quite mad and I immediately made her go to her room. She cried and moaned and I hoped she’d get it. However in the morning as we went downstairs, I saw that her backpack was fat again (I hid the purse) and found a pair of her jeans and her black shoes together with other summer clothes. We had been telling her not to take those clothes to school since it’s hot now, yet being “strong-willed” she thinks she can do whatever she wants. I knew Lori only packed the lighter clothes, so I asked her if she did and she denied it. Knowing this was Lie #2, I told her that she will not be taking a backpack and that was it.

I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how on earth I’m going to teach her a lesson. Finally I decided to make her experience the disappointment of being lied to multiple times. Call me cruel, but I sure had a smile on my face as I acted out the following as soon as I got home:

“Isabella, guess what we’re going to do after you finish eating? We’re all going to have some ice-cream and then we’ll go to swim.” She immediately took the bait and got extremely excited. Then I told her “And you’ll stay up late with me so we can play”. The excitement continued and she quickly swallowed her dinner, getting ready for ice-cream. So there goes Disappointment #1 as I restated what happened the day before when she lied to me and that now I was lying to her and she was not getting any ice-cream. She immediately sombered up and started crying. I fed Isaac some melted ice-ream and proceeded to Disappointment #2. “Isabella, remember I told you we’d go swim? Sorry, I lied to you. Doesn’t that feel terrible? We’re actually NOT going to swim”. She proceeded to get upset, cry some more, and after asking if she’s going to lie again, she said “No!”. We’ll wait and see how much truth there is to it!

So finally we waited a little more and then proceeded to Disappointment #3: “So Isabella, I lied to you again and we’re not staying up to play. You are going straight to bed right now and Isaac is staying here. See how bad it feels when someone lies to you?”. That seems to have cracked her shell a little bit and she cried and shed some serious tears, sobbing like a sputtering engine with no gas. After taking her to bed and summarizing the whole event, she wept for a few more minutes and fell asleep.

I know I know, what a mean dad! But you gotta do what you gotta do. If we don’t set the tone now, things will get out of hand later and it’ll be too late to set the course when she’s older. We’re only a handful of years away from when she’ll think that she knows everything better than we do!

Finally, here are some photos from last Friday while eating at Black-Eyed Pea and at Isaac’s school open house on Saturday. PS: The Tooth Fairy has not paid us a visit yet.