Porky Pies

The English have a whole catalogue of regional accents and dialects, identifiable right down to a village within a town or county.  It's pretty amazing, really.  And within the confines of London itself, there are several distinct and separate dialects as well, most notably Cockney.  Cockney has its own language of sorts, using something called "rhyming slang" to denote a word or idea through the use of completely incongruous words used together that rhyme with the intended word that they've substituted for.  For example, "going down the frog and toad" is "going down the road."  And "telling porkies" is short for "telling porky pies" which are lies.  Fascinating stuff, really.

Samantha's been telling her own porkies lately.  Like the real, obvious, blatent kind, the kind that tells you that only a child who still knows absolutely nothing of the basic, deductive reasoning used to figure stuff like that out, could have told.  But in its own way, it's quite exciting. 

My kid's making stuff up!  Woohoo!!

But it has certainly forced us to do our own investigations on the side to see what's really true, or what really happened.  For example, Samantha came home the other day with her boots untied and on the wrong feet.  We asked her what happened, and she said, "P. took them off."  After a few more leading pointed questions, I deduced that P. had taken them off of her to try them on herself. 

Uh, which was totally not what happened. 

According to the teacher, Samantha had taken them off herself.  Period.  No other complicit parties. 

Another day, Samantha came home without her lunch bag.  When questioned, she stated that "M. took it from me."  Okay, so this idea really isn't that far-fetched.  Knowing M., that could very well have happened.  I asked her why M. took it from her, and her answer was that he wasn't behaving, that he was being annoying.  Her lunch bag was still in the classroom the next morning, and we were unable to confirm or deny her story, as no one else knew whether what she said was fact or fiction.

Another example - Samantha has, on numerous occasions, been told no by one parent, only to go to the other parent, talk about something completely different, then go back to parent #1 and say that Mommy/Daddy said yes.  This forces one parent to question the other, only to find out that they'd both been had by the pint-sized-one. 

And we laugh now, knowing that it's a necessary stage in childhood development, hoping that it doesn't stick around beyond its welcome. 

In the meantime, we grin and bear it and ask a lot of questions, never sure what to Adam and Eve.