Liar Liar, Pants on Fire

Caught Ajers in a major lie today. Here's the story: (of a man named Brady... sorry that just sort of popped into my brain and I had to add)

Anyway, Ajers, and he will absolutely KILL me if he ever knew I was writing this about him. He still has shhh.... accidents at night and he's seven. Now I hear that is not all that unusual, and he's not worked up about it, the doctor's not worked up about it, I'm not worked up about it and neither is Scott. So, aside from buying XL Good Nites pants (aka Pull Ups for larger kids), there's no problem with the current situation. And, slowly, he is getting better at bladder control, and only has an accident once or twice a week when before it was 4-6 times a week, so we're getting somewhere.

That's not the point though. He's been doing so well, and he's been asking for Roller Blades, so we thought we'd try to give him an incentive to work on not peeing in the middle of the night. We should have known right away that is a bad idea. Like he can control what happens when he's asleep (and he did have terrible night terrors for about two years which were worse than dealing with a newborn--and I knew because I had a newborn the same time the night terrors, teeth grinding, screaming out loud in the middle of the night but not knowing and not waking up stuff was happening). I was certainly not a happy person to be around during that time.

So, we know he can't control what happens in the middle of the night, but he's been doing well so we told him if he could stay dry for seven days in a row, we'd buy him the roller blades. The other morning, Sunday, he woke up very distressed and I just knew, just knew, that he had wet in the night. I told him not to worry, we shouldn't be putting that kind of pressure on him. He was devastated, crying, etc. Then, I went into the bathroom, and on the floor I saw the Pull Up. I picked it up and it was DRY! I ran to tell him the good news.

"It was dry, AJ, you didn't wet!"

"It was?"

"Yeah, did you leave it in the bathroom on the floor?"

"Yes."

"Then it was dry!"

So, I was thrilled, mostly because I didn't want him being so sad. We marked on the calendar day three of being dry. This morning, another dry one. We were making headway.

Until I cleaned his room this afternoon.

Two wet Pull Ups on the floor tucked between his bed and dresser.

Busted.

Man, how to handle this sucker? It's a tough one. He lied, he thought about his lie, and he continued to let me believe he was staying dry. One lie, after another lie, after another lie... (and I just tried to post to Glossthis's blog because she had a similar situation on her blog about her seven-year-old telling a lie--you can go to Glossthis by checking out the comments on my previous post on death to get linked to her)... and still more lies... But Glossthis had a good idea, and I think she said she and her husband (correct me if wrong, Gloss) let their son decide the punishment.

So, after I told Scott what happened, and he way more freaked out than I did (I felt more guilty like I put too much pressure on him regarding something he couldn't control)... we spoke to Ajers, and yada yadad about how it's wrong to lie, yada yada. Then we said maybe we could come up with a fair punishment, and that revoking Roller Blades in the future would not be fair because it was an unfair goal for him to work for in the first place.

So we asked him what he thought was fair and he said "You put too much pressure on me."

Duh, we realized that, but we wanted to know a fair punishment.

He said he should not go play basketball with Matt for four days.

We said, "what about all the other kids in the neighborhood, would you still be allowed to play with them?"

Shrug.

I said, "How about two days in the house after school with no friends." We all agreed that this seemed fair.

Until I realized that this is going to be pure punishment for me, having to have him in the house, whining and griping about how badly he wants to go out and play, and hell, I wasn't even the one who lied!

Ahh, parenting, what joy!