That Time the Suckers went Missing

Before I tell you this story, I have to give a bit of background information. Lately, Kyla has been a little mischievous. Which is a nice way of saying that she has been sneaking things and lying about them. She and her BFF, Gwen, got into the fingernail polish in my closet for the 1,000th time (the very DAY we had talked about not going into parents' bedrooms) recently.

She snuck a package of Starburst, ate them, and left the trash all over her closet floor.

She came home from school with a jacket I had never seen before, and she told me that her friend had given it to her, "because she had a copy of it."  Later that afternoon, her teacher called and said there had been a mix-up with jackets, and there was a little girl quite upset when she couldn't find hers. Kyla finally confessed that she had taken the jacket (which was identical to the one her friend, Olivia, has) and put it in her backpack as she was leaving school. We had a BIG discussion about stealing, and I went with her the next day so she could apologize.

I told her the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and I thought we were making some headway with the sneakiness and the lying.

Okay, now for the story. The kids had given Jeff some candy for his birthday. And because there is no safe hiding place anywhere in this house, Jeff put the candy in one of his clothes drawers, where it safely remained for days. But on Wednesday morning, he noticed that a bag of Tootsie Pops had disappeared. We gathered the kids together and asked them about it. Of course, no one knew ANYTHING about it.

And, of course, we instantly suspected Kyla. I mean, she is the girl who cried wolf. How could we believe that she was telling the truth about taking candy? So after dismissing the other four, we started grilling her. She held fast, promising she had nothing to do with it. We made her sit on the floor in our room to think about it. And then things started to get a bit weird.

She changed her story, and told us that she HAD seen the bag of suckers, but she hadn't taken it. She had seen Carter carrying it around downstairs. But she couldn't remember where she had seen him. And frankly, we didn't believe her. Carter would have had to have some help to get the bag open, and he is not capable of doing that himself, nor is he afraid to ask ME for help. So we told her to keep thinking.

She then told me, through her tears, that she had taken the suckers and had them downstairs in the bathroom, but she didn't know where they were. So we went down and searched the bathroom. There were no suckers anywhere. She then said she thought she had put them in one of the drawers. No such luck.

Jeff and I repeatedly told her that she wasn't in trouble, but we just wanted to know the truth! What had happened to that bag of suckers? It wasn't as though it would be hard to miss! So, I told her I was going to take the boys to the library and she could stay home with Jeff, unless she just came clean and told us what really happened.

And then she changed her story again. She told me now that she had been hiding her purse in one of Jeff's drawers and forgot which one. So when she was looking for it, she found the suckers. She said she couldn't get them open, and didn't want to get into trouble, so she had hidden them under the bed. And so we went to look, certain the mystery was solved. Except it wasn't, because the suckers weren't there either.

By this time, Jeff and I were both coming to the conclusion that she really didn't know what had happened to the suckers, and that she hadn't been the one to take them. It was like an episode of Dateline, where the criminal confesses to a crime that they just couldn't have committed, but are coerced into admitting that they did.

I confronted her again, asking her if she had taken the suckers. This time she said no. And she had no explanation for why she had been telling us stories all morning, saying that she had.

None of the kids have confessed to this point, and I really don't know what to believe. It's laughable, really. Especially since the next morning, the suckers were back in Jeff's drawer. Hmmm. Interesting. Maybe they were there all along?