I was making Mac & Cheese for lunch. Sari was sitting at the table ready to eat and she said: “Mom said I could sit on my blanket in front of the fireplace.”
Okay. Here we go. This wasn’t an unrealistic claim. Amanda could have told Sari this, but I wasn’t sure. Amanda was not in the room with us, as she was getting ready to run some errands. So I did a little detective work. My goal was to find out if this was really true or if she was just saying this to me in order to sit on her blanket and eat her Mac & Cheese.
Me: “Sari, if I were to ask Mom if she said this, what would she say?”
Sari was quiet. “Hmmm,” I wondered.
I asked again: “Sari, would Mom say that she said that if I asked?”
“Yep,” she nodded, “she would.”
I wanted to push her a little bit more to make sure: “Sari, do you remember what we’ve talked about before about lying?” She nods. “I want to give you another chance to tell me the truth, just in case you are just trying to sit in front of the fireplace by lying.”
Sari assured me that she wasn’t lying and told me the truth. “Okay. I’ll believe you, but I’m going to ask Mom, okay?”
A few minutes later Amanda comes into the kitchen and says: “Jeremy, Sari’s worried that you think she is lying. She isn’t just so you know. I told her she could sit in front of the fireplace and eat her Mac & Cheese on the blanket.”
I was thankful that Sari told me the truth. I asked her to come over to me and I gave her a big hug and thanked her for being the kind of person who tells the truth and one I can trust. She beamed.
Now I wasn’t super-worried about Sari eating food in the living room, I just wanted to make sure that she wasn’t scheming to accomplish this by using Mom to tell a lie. She wasn’t and for that I was very grateful and proud of her.
