This is why I love you guys.
Now pat yourselves on the back. A little lower. Right on the SHOULDERBLADE!
As a disclaimer, allow me to say that I’ve learned most of my parenting skills from such sources as Bill Cosby, Homer Simpson, and Calvins father (from Calvin and Hobbes).
#1 - The Alien
I told one of my kids he’s actually an alien. His alien parents left him here when he was a baby for us to raise. We have pictures of the “delivery” and everything.
#2 - The Reindeer
I told my kids I was Santa Claus (true, from a certain point of view). They became wide-eyed and asked where I kept the reindeer. I told them the reindeer were in the shed.
They asked to see the reindeer. I told them it was too dangerous, the reindeer got hungy from being kept in the shed all year long & would likely eat the first child that stumbled in there.
They were scared of the reindeer & the shed from then on. When we moved, I told them I had to sell the business (& the reindeer) to some one else.
#3 - Chocolate
My kid once asked me where chocolate comes from. I told him there are vast chocolate mines in Africa. Except for the liquid kind (chocolate syrup) - They have to drill for that. Offshore, mostly.
#4 - Aliens & Monsters
One day as I was leaving for work, one of my kids asked me where I was going. I replied “Out to hunt aliens & monsters.” When I got back, they all wanted to know how many I’d gotten, if I was scared, etc.
#5 - The Car
I surprised my wife with a new car a couple of years ago. I went and bought the car, then hid it in a friends garage - we made some excuse to get Mrs. Jim to come over, and surprise!! The kids were with her, and asked “Where did you get the car?” I told them I’d built it in the garage.
#6 - Jesse James
My wife & I got our boys one of those battery-operated ridable motorcycles that go about 5 MPH for christmas '03. On the tag I wrote “To the boys from Jesse James” (the Monster Garage guy). I told him he dropped by after they’d gone to bed to drop it off.
#7 - Methuselah
I told my kids I was 100 years old, and my father was 1000.
#8 - Thar she blows!
While we were in the car my kids saw a large crane at some construction site, and asked what it was. I told them it was a giant fishing rod, for catching whales.
I’m sure there are more, but those’ll do for now 
You are my new hero!
Not me, but my mother (and of course she denies these incidents, so I’ll never know what it was that she was thinking)
-my youngest sister was born with a red round birthmark on her belly. The other sister asked what it was one day. Mom replied “Do you remember when you bit her on the back? Well - it went all the way through!”
-one day I came home with some rocks (pebbles, really) that I had found on the street. They had been painted blue somehow. Mom got mad at me and told me they were dynamite, and would explode and kill me.
You are my new parenting role model. I can’t wait to have kids, so I can tell them of the deep, dark chocolate mines.
Not quite a lie to a child, but in the same vein…
My father taught me to read at a very early age (3 or 4) and encouraged me to read anything and everything that I wanted. As a result, when I entered elementary school, I skipped the first grade and entered the second grade reading at a seventh grade level.
When I was six, he gave me a copy of The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James . I don’t know if he did it as a joke or if he really thought that I would enjoy the book, but it gave me the screaming heebie-jeebies for a couple of days. I kept reading it over and over, though. It became one of my favorite books of all times.
Although I still wake up in a cold sweat every once in a while… :eek:
At 4 or 5, my dad told me that spaghetti grew on trees.
Which happened to be just before the Ronzoni commercials that showed…women harvesting from spaghetti trees in an Italian vineyard. It took me awhile before I could be convinced otherwise.
One time, he told my older brother that Santa couldn’t make it that year because he was in a car accident. Naturally, Santa came and all was well. It wouldn’t have been memorable except that the next year, going to sit on Santa’s lap at my mom’s church, “Santa” came in and said, “Sorry I’m late kids! I got into a car accident on the way here! Ho, ho, ho!”
At which point, my brother turned to my mom and exclaimed, “See! Dad was telling the truth!”
My Dad was with a bunch of other Dads chaperoning my brother’s Cub Scout troop camping trip. One kid brought some pancake mix & made pancakes for the kids. One snotty boy turned up his nose at them as “We always have maple syrup when we have pancakes at home!”
So Dad just smarted off to him that some trees nearby were maple trees & if he wanted syrup, he could look for one with a spigot.
Dad was amazed a little later when another Dad told him that several boys had spent an hour looking for the spigotted maple trees.
My father always maintained that I had been brought by The Gypsies.
He was home watching TV, when there was a knock on the door.
“Who is it?” he called.
“A friendly neighbor, leaving you delicious peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches in a basket on your stoop.”
Well, my father was a great afficianado of PB n’J sammiches, so he rushed to the door, only to discover that he’d been tricked! Instead of a yummy treat, there was a baby in the basket, and a gypsy wagon hightailing it down Newtown Lane.
I never believed him, but it was a running joke in my family for years, culminating when I was 12 or so and my Godmother gave me a tambourine for Christmas, telling me to “explore my ethnic roots.”
Funny, I never did learn to play the violin…
My daughter was afraid of the vacuum cleaner for about two weeks. Once during that time I was home when hubby started to vacuum. I opened my arms and said “I’ll save you from that evil contraption!” She ran and leaped into my arms. I felt like such a hero. In just a couple of weeks she was completly over her fear.
BWAH-hahaha!! That’s awesome. I’m going to have to do something lik that to my “alien”. Hehehe
I had a couple of fake tombstone decorations that I put out for H’ween each year. One of the stones had a simple “RIP Bob” legend on it, and my son was being particularly bratty while we were decorating. He asked who Bob was and I replied “He’s your deceased older brother. When I tell you to obey, you’d do well to listen.”
Of course, he immediately said he didn’t believe me and I just let him yammer, giving him the inscrutable type stare. He tried calling Grandma for confirmation and Grandpa answered the phone and figured it out right away, totally going along with it, asking the boy “Where do you think Mommy learned to parent you, she’s not new at this y’know” and similarly keeping him wondering.
Bob’s still a good cautionary warning around our house years later. 
Just for clarification, is it like a camera tripod or one of the giant Martian fighting mcahines from War of the Worlds?
Not me, but my daughter. Hallgirl2 has told Hallboy from day one about the “other brother”…ya’ know, the one who died when she hung in him upside down in the closet and tickled him until he died.
I’ve never either confirmed, nor denied the story…
We used to tell The Kid that if she didn’t behave we would sell her to the gypsies and they would feed her to the dancing bear. It was not really believed (we thought). It was harmless (we thought). Then one fine day, there were gypsies with a dancing bear on televsion and she saw it. Lost her mind and ran screaming from the room.
When my son was about seven he constantly pestered us to be driven to the local Army & Navy store. Once we were outside in the yard and he was badgering me yet again and I told him it was closed because of a nerve gas canister leak. It was quite opportune that right at that moment there were some sirens coming from that area of the neighborhood.
Apparently he believed me because about a week later Mr. Anachi had an errand near the Army & Navy store and asked the boy if he wanted to go along. Of course the boy wanted to know if the nerve gas was cleared out and if it was safe.
When I was in second grade a teacher threatened to take me to the “guillotine”, why, I don’t remember. I had no idea what a guillotine was then, so I asked what it was. She said it was a big blade that they use to chop your head off. I was so scared that I started crying and panicking to the point of hyperventilating, so the teacher confessed that she was only kidding. Still, in retrospect, I think it was a rather cruel way for a teacher to threaten someone.
When I was very small my dad did something like this:
Dad: I saw what you were doing.
Me: Huh? What?
Dad: I saw you. You were hesitating on the threshold.
Me: Huh? No I wasn’t.
Dad: Yes you were. Right there. Look you just did it again.
Me: Stop it! I didn’t! Waaaaaaaaaa!
It took me an embarassingly long while to figure that one out.
You and I have the same role models; substitute Al Bundy for Homer though.
Even though my kids are now 15 and 12, I can still tell the stories to great effect. I’m trying to see just how far back into one’s head one can roll one’s eyes.
I’ve used my favorite Bill Cosby line on many occassions, “I brought you into this world. I can take you right back out…make another one looks just like you.”
My current favorite reminder to them is that, as their parent, it is my sworn duty to embarass them in front of their friends whenever possible. I say this knowing that, as a parent, I can embarass them just by being on the same planet at the same time.
One of my earliest memories (I know I was 4 at the most) is of being in the garden near our house, watching a spider build her web with a friend my age. We found it fascinating as well as beautiful. It was very early in the morning, so dewdrops were forming on the web as she built it.
Then my friend’s one-year-older sister came along and told us that spiders were terribly dangerous, that they had poison and if that spider bit us we would die a horrible death and it would hurt real, REAL BAD.
It’s now down to revulsion, but I was terrified of spiders for years. Figuring out that Spanish garden spiders aren’t tarantulas helped some, but don’t ever take me to watch Arachnophobia or you’ll be paying the doctor bills. I mean the ones for the trauma caused when I try to get out of the theater running over you.
On the other hand, my mom is a 'toon (we figured it out when I “forced” the whole family to watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit), which explains why one of my brothers is The Last Of His Species (as he’s been defining himself ever since kindergarten).
We had terrible arguments over who was assisting each of the Three Kings with Xmas presents, as each of us graduated from believing in these camel-riding fellows bringing presents on January 5 to being gift-givers. I am the oldest so I got to pick first, but my brothers wanted Balthazar too (that’s the black one). We finally decided that the whole family works for Balthazar but it’s not compulsory to stay with him, you can switch if you want.