Our Sneaky Son

Our older son, Harrison, was a “hider” throughout much of his early childhood. It started with his pacifiers.  He would hide them in places around the house, and dig them out whenever he needed one. Granted, they would usually be a bit gritty, but that didn’t stop him. He couldn’t stand having dirt on his hands, but dirt in his mouth? No problem!
 
As soon as he was old enough to know what candy was, he started hiding it as well. He had a great love of Jolly Ranchers, and we would find them hidden under his mattress, in between the couch cushions, and in his underwear drawer. Some of the pieces were half-chewed, others were a bit fuzzy, and some had been unwrapped and re-wrapped. They were everywhere.
 
By the time Harrison started Kindergarten, he seemed to believe himself to be an expert at hiding things, so he graduated from Jolly Ranchers to homework.  If you’re a parent of a school-age child, you know the drill – teachers put worksheets in your child’s folder, and they bring that folder home.  Well, we were starting to wonder why Harrison never seemed to have any homework, and at about the same time we starting wondering, his teacher started wondering why Harrison was never turning-in any homework.
 
The mystery was solved when Kari got it into her head to rearrange the furniture one evening.  For those who don’t know my wife, she gets strange urges (usually at about 10:30 or 11:00 PM, whenever I’ve had a long, exhausting, and mentally trying day) to move the furniture around, just to see if it looks and works better in another configuration.  Anyway, we (meaning I, the pack-mule) started moving the furniture, and lo and behold, what did we find? Homework sheets - lots of them! They were stuffed behind bookshelves, under tables, tucked inside the TV stand, and wedged in between boxes in the office/storeroom.
 
So up to this point, our precious little five-year old had been insisting that his teacher had not been giving him any homework, and seemed certain that she was, in fact, mistaken when she contacted us about why he hadn’t been turning in his assignments.  He stuck to his story up until the very moment when we (and by we, I mean Kari) confronted him with the evidence of his crime.  He then proceeded to the classic child’s defense when he was asked why he was hiding his homework.
 
“I don't know.”
 
And thus was the beginning of the Age of Grounding and Age of Privileges Taken-Away.
 
Things did not get better for our young n’er-do-well as soon as you might expect.  He had also decided that, since he forgot to return a library book on time, that the better thing to do was hide it somewhere in the house.  So, the school started pestering us to return the book, which he of course told us he returned.  Eventually, we paid the fine (which was more than enough to pay for the book three times over) and chalked it up to him losing the book somewhere (probably at school).  Little did we know that three years later, when we moved out of the house we would find a carefully stashed, well-overdue library book in his closet.

 

Since those days, Harrison has learned that we (okay, mostly Mom) are watching him carefully, and he has either stopped hiding things from us, or has gotten much sneakier.  I suppose if you can’t be completely honest, the next best thing is to be clever enough not to get caught.

Cullen