The Deceiver

Remember a while back when my innocent little Mary became a thief, and then taught her little brother the trick? Well, she took a brief hiatus from her life of crime--and is now back on the rampage.

She must be bored this summer--and very hungry. Just since we got back from our vacation she has eaten WITHOUT permission: ONE whole ziplock bag full of the chocolate candy left over from Halloween (she found the stash in the freezer and just went to town), ONE piece of gum--while being grounded from candy due to the freezer candy incident from five days prior, ONE peppermint patty just the DAY after the gum incident and barely a week after the original crime(seriously...she is just NOT a smart candy thief--you expect me NOT to notice the minty freshness?), FOUR--maybe FIVE--soft chocolate chip cookies from the kitchen cabinet (ignorantly leaving the empty bag behind apparently thinking that her parents would just NOT see it), AND THEN BARELY 24 HOURS LATER, she ate a Slimfast bar and threw the wrapper on the floor of her bedroom where GOSH, no mother would just EVER find it!

Her ineptitude and clumsiness astonish me. I'm sure I was MUCH better at hiding things when I was her age.

I actually knew she had taken candy out of the freezer. I wasn't going to say anything about it. After all, it's basically partly HER candy, and a piece here and there isn't going to hurt. I was being all Zen about it and just "letting it go." BUT to open the freezer and see a bag COMPLETELY empty (and in just a week's time) was just too much. The point, my darling child, is that you are SUPPOSED to ask. AND I don't want you to become a glutton just for the SAKE of becoming a GLUTTON!

And in actuality, I wouldn't have cared about a piece of gum or a mint here or there either. This was ALSO her candy which she got from kids' birthday parties (and THIS is one of the reasons I put MAYBE one piece of candy in the goodie bags I hand out--WHY mothers? Why put SO MUCH candy there? Are you emptying your house of all your excess Halloween/Easter CRAP? Why the compulsion? Seriously?). Um, anyway, the POINT was that due to her gluttony of the week prior, we grounded her from treats for a week. So no lesson learned from the punishment--not even better ways to sneak it so that her mother wouldn't find it.

Chocolate chip cookies are the devil's food and so that incident may have been more readily forgiven--if not attached to the three previous, and if she hadn't eaten the REST of the package leaving NONE for Dad (who had BOUGHT the cookies and ended up with NONE). Once again, no lesson learned yet. She also did the unforgivable act of ALMOST letting an innocent victim take the blame for it. See, I'm not as naive about all this as I used to. Keith knew where the cookies were and had just as much access as she did. We asked SOMEONE to step forward and admit their mistake, but the innocent faces abounded. I finally pulled aside the person I was 90% sure was guilty of the offence and got her to fess up. How DARE you throw your poor brother under the bus like that?

The Slimfast bar is an enigma. She maintains that she actually did this offence "sometime last week" (YES, while STILL being grounded from treats, folks). But as her mother, I'm quite intimate with the state of her room, and I'm sure I would have noticed the half-hazardly thrown wrapper that wasn't even CLOSE to the trash before now. Maybe some of her dirty clothes were on it.

I have obviously failed as a parent. My eldest is not learning to ASK. She is not learning to CONTROL her chocolate (or sugury) urges. She is also not learning to OWN UP to mistakes she has made. And grounding her is laughably ineffective. I finally told her that she could not have a play date this week. THAT brought on the waterworks. WILL it bring on the other lessons needed to be learned? I sure hope so. Otherwise the rest of her summer is going to be Awfully Dull.

God. Now I think I know why she had so many cavaties all of a sudden.