Whoppers

There is some gigantic fib telling going on in the Bickerson household. The tall tales started this summer but their frequency, and the amount of detail, has increased exponetially since kindergarten started. We've heard tales of police pulling over the school bus driver, kids having arms broken by holding them out the bus windows, first grade teachers hospitalized so that first graders have to attend class with the kindergarteners, and so on. When Hank tells me these tales I just look at him calmly. He knows I know he's fibbing but he persists with a lot of It's true! It really is true!

Today I decided to tell the kids the story about The Boy Who Cried Wolf. I didn't tell them why I was telling it. I just did it. In the version I told I asked rhetorically, wasn't it too bad that, because the boy had fibbed to everyone, when he really needed help fighting off the wolf, nobody believed the wolf was there? Midway through the story Hank was all ears, very attentive and eager to find out what happens in the end. By the end of the story he looked like a kid who realized he's been tricked into enjoying a story that turned out to have a parental purpose. He was mad about it! And then he informed me that if HE had been the boy he would have just fought the wolf all by himself.