I’ve told dozens of people over the years that I’m allergic to chlorophyll as an excuse for not eating salad. There are people who’ve believed this for as much as six or seven years before figuring it out.
Zut alors!
When I was on camp staff, we used to send new campers out to the Quartermaster for a left handed smoke bender with the explanation that it was, “a device you put over the campfire to bend the smoke out of the way.”
My five year old has started lying about little things now and then. And when I KNOW he is doing this I tell him I can see his “MOMMY DOT”.
It is a dot that only mommy’s can see right between kids eyes when they are lying.
Sometimes he will come tell me some little lie with his hand already over his “mommy dot”. A dead giveaway! 
Oh, yeah. My parents had us convinced that our eyes turned green whenever we lied. We used to go tell them things with our eyes closed.
When one of my parents’ friends (a widow) first came to visit from out of town, she brought her two kids. Her son had had a leg amputated when he was 12. I was about 5 at the time.
I was told that he’d lost it in a car accident, the same one that had killed his father. Also, I was not to mention it, as it would make him feel uncomfortable.
Decades later, I’m visiting my parents, and we mention their friend and her family. I asked something about the car accident, to which my mom replied, “What accident? David Sr. died of cancer. And cancer also was the reason David Jr. lost his leg.”
But my mom completely forgot the little lie she told a five-year-old who couldn’t possibly understand what cancer was. :rolleyes:
Not a kid story, but the Riverside County (CA) court performs settlement conferences in the main hall. Somewhere in history, the court invented a department number for that, which all the local attorneys know. The local lawyers get a kick out of watching out of town lawyers trying to locate that department, wandering the hallways looking confused.
A friend of mine had his kids convinced he was a wizard and every time they approached the car, he could open the trunk with “Opennnn Sesameeee”.
Oh, there are so many. My youngest would NOT clean her room. I am far from a neat freak, but that room was just disgusting. I told her that if she didn’t get her clothes off the floor and remove whatever was there from under the bed that she would attract capybaras.
When I was a teacher, I occasionally would say to the first youngster to arrive in class, “Did you study for the quiz today?” He/She would of course not remember about the quiz because, in fact, I had never told them they would have a quiz, nor did I plan to give one. But the victim would quickly sit down and start skimming the previous day’s lesson frantically. Next person arrives and I don’t have to say another thing, because the first one passes the word. Soon the whole class is there, madly trying to study. I start the lesson, and everyone is good as gold because I seem to have temporarily forgotten the test. Only works once with a set of kids, maybe twice if they are not the brightest.
In the old days there was no quick strep test. If a kid had a sore throat, she got a throat swab at the doctor’s, and you would get a call the next day telling you the results. If it was positive, the child had to be brought in again for an antibiotic injection. On one occasion when this happened, I knew that if I told my daughter that she had to go to the doctor for a shot she’d throw a fit, so I told her I was going to the soda store and she could come along. That was a treat because the soda store sometimes gave kids a lollipop. So we DID go to the soda store, which was about a quarter mile from the pediatrician. Upon leaving the store I just made a right instead of a left, and we proceeded to the doctor’s office. She didn’t notice for a bit, actually not until we pulled into the parking lot. So, technically, I didn’t lie.
I remember a conversation my father once had with one of his granddaughters. She was asking about the cellar in his house. (The door into the cellar was quite noticeable but the stairs were steep and dangerous so it was always kept locked when kids were around which apparently made the cellar a fascinating mystery.)
“Are there spiders down there?”
“Yes.”
“Are there monkeys down there?”
“Yes”
“What do the monkeys eat?”
“Spiders”
When I was a kid, then as now, I had a headful of curly hair. I always wanted to wear it in braids like my friends and sisters, but my mother liked the looks of the curls. She told me that I couldn’t wear braids because it would take the curl out. She even got my grandmother to go along with it, telling me that she (Granny) had had curly hair as a girl, but wore it in braids and now it was straight.
Yeah, right, Mom. And you expect me to believe what you told me about sex now too!
When I was a scout, we had an assistant scoutmaster actually make a left handed smokeshifter for us. It was an 8 foot length of aluminum air-conditioning duct, with a funnel at the bottom to channel the smoke and a single handle that was conspicuously labeled “LEFT.” More than a few kids stumbled out of our camp with a hunk of metal half-again as tall as they were - I always wanted to see what happened when they actually showed up with one.
The one I remember best was being in high school and admiring the beautifully blooming magnolia tree outside my friend’s house. She got all upset, and said “What’s a magnolia? That’s a Mongolia tree!” She could not be swayed from this, since her father had told her years ago that that was the name of the tree and had consistently called it that all her life, thus it was so. I really hope she got it straightened out at some point.
I already posted this in another thread, The Truth About Grown-Ups.
There used to be a toy store called Child World. When I was about three, my mom wanted to do a little shopping without me, so she asked her boyfriend to take me there. I didn’t know it was a toy store, the name makes it sound like an orphanage, and I pitched the biggest fit she’d ever seen. I can still remember my terror. We got it all straightened out though, and I got a sweet Etch a Sketch.
When my little sister was about six, she asked me explain why I said I was a sophomore when really I was in tenth grade. She wanted to know if elementary school grades had cool names like that. Of course they do, dummy, I said. Right now you’re a hooker, next year you’ll be a commie, after that a Nazi, after that a transvestite, etc… And when she was being a real pisser, I’d get on the phone to call Santa. Helped everytime.
When my grandfather didn’t want to do something, (“Come look what I can do, grandpa!”) He’d tell me he couldn’t because he had a bone in his knee. It wasn’t exactly a lie.
He’s also send me into the workshop for a skyhook when I was “helping” too much.
What year do you get be a “pisser”?
My grandfather was a wonderful jokester, but perhaps his most successful one was the money tree in his back yard. It was a fairly small tree, but every time we visited, he could find and pick dollar bills off that tree. I don’t know how many hours I spent searching over and under every leaf and branch trying to find a dollar myself. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that it finally occurred to me what was really going on. He was very proud of himself.
anniz and I had one briefly, when the elder of the two boys fired up the “Why” chain (you know, the answer to the original question is “Why?” and then every subsequent answer is met with the same question). We finally told him to go ask the purple cow - who eventually turned out to live somewhere in the house, so there were many fruitless searches around the apartment.
We actually found a couple stuffed purple cows online but never got around to buying one and putting him in a kitchen cabinet. We should have.
Alas I’ve given my nieces and nephews so much misinformation they don’t believe a word I say anymore. In fact I think I overdid it…
“Aunt Shell…why do you tease us all the time?”
“Uhhhhhh…” Shit shit shit, now I feel guilty! “Well uhh it’s…because I love you sweetie.”
And the look she gave me was like, yeah right. So I must change my teasing ways!
When I was in preschool, my best friend’s mother took us to the local water park. To enter the park, you passed over a bridge over a weedy pond. My friend told me that there was an earless monkey living in this pond, who, despite his lack of ears, had very good hearing. If you talked too loudly or make too much noise crossing the bridge, he would jump out and eat you. Quite an elaborate tale for a preschooler!
Later, inside the park, we came upon a play structure shaped liked a giant monkey. A shrine to the earless pond monkey, I thought! It must be true!