Was spending some time recently with my brother and sister-in-law and their two kids (ages 6 and 9). My sense of humor runs to the surreal, and I had a great time making up ridiculous lies and presenting them as truth. A few things I’ve attempted, with mixed success, to get the kids to believe:
The cut on my chin came not from shaving, but from a shark attack.
I was never age 9. I skipped directly from age 8 to 10, having first obtained special permission to do so.
Sushi has to be “de-cooked”. They are familiar with cooked fish for dinner, and one day we went out for sushi and I explained that the cooked fish is put through a device that makes it raw again. They sell this device at Costco, but they haven’t found it yet.
Costco also carries a “Bell Un-Ringer” and “Polar Bear Oil”, which is used to lubricate the fish de-cooker.
The long tools you attach to hoses to water plants are actually for cleaning giraffe and elephant ears. For all I know, zoos actually might use them that way…
The kids know about mountain gorillas and mountain lions. They are skeptical of my claims of encountering “mountain lobsters” and “mountain jellyfish”.
What outrageous lies do you tell the kids in your life? And save the Santa Claus or god snark - I need creative stuff to continue messing with my niece and nephew.
I told my kids I invented knock-knock jokes. I know alot of them, so sue me! I further stated they could look it up in an encyclopedia some day. They searched for years and never could prove or disprove it. For all I know they still believe it!
Not quite what the OP is looking for, but we have always told our son that he has numerous dead siblings buried in the yards of the houses we lived in before he was born, because those children did not meet our standards so we offed them and tried again. (It works because we were married for 16 years before our son was born, so plenty of time to produce and murder other children.)
Altamont Pass, which connects the SF Bay Area to the San Joaquin Valley, is home to hundreds of power-generating windmills. When we would drive thru there the while a lot of them were spinning, I would tell my kids that is how the world goes around.
At Yellowstone and Old Faithful, I told them there was a ranger around the corner who would spin a wheel, like on a sailing ship, and that would release the hot water.
I was born on Halloween. Mini Atlas was told that Halloween is nothing but a celebration of my birthday, just like Christmas is a celebration of Jesus’. She believed it until age five. Then she told the whole kindergarten class, and of course some of them told their parents. Some of whom got seriously angry.
I did it all the time with my kids but my favorite one was with my niece and nephew.
They were downstairs at my mother’s house watching tv. I snuck to the top of the stairs with the other remote and started to randomly change the channels. That went for a while with much enjoyment on my part until they noticed me. I was able to convince them that they touched the shoe on the ground next to the tv. It was a magic shoe and they were changing the channel every time they touched it.
I convinced my daughters that their eyes turn green when they lie, but only adults can see it. I was genuinely impressed with the scientific experiments they came up with to prove me wrong.
Sort of similar – when I was a little kid, one day my school was closed on November 7. You, being an adult, will realize why – November 7 is election day, and my school was a polling place, so the school shut down for the day.
However, when I asked my father why I didn’t have to go to school that day, he told me that it was a holiday because it was his birthday. I believed him.
I haven’t thought of any good ones to tell my kids yet (well, at least the one old enough to talk). I did convince my niece, when she was a bit less than two years old, that she had a tail, and she just couldn’t see it because it was behind her.
I don’t have any bio-kids. I came on the scene when my step-daughter was 10. She turns 17 tomorrow. I decided at the start that Calvin’s dad would be my inspiration.
Early on one day, I was in a different room from Daughter when I let out a thunderous belch, then immediately blamed it on the cat. Daughter bought it, and was astounded. The second time, she was suspicious. After that, she wouldn’t believe me anymore.
One time when she was 12 or 13, she emerged from her room and asked her mother if she had ever “twerked.” Mom said “um… no.” Then Daughter asked me. In my best Jon Stewart voice, I said “I… don’t know what that means.”*
Daughter: “It’s like… a human mating dance.”
Me: “Oh, right. I do that with your mom all the time.”
Daughter: “WHAAAAT??!”
She then ran off to her room giggling, presumably to post on her online hangouts about what freaks her parents were.
*I knew full well what it meant.
My brother had told his kids that he had to walk uphill to school both ways. I went to see him before he passed. He was sleeping when I got there but his kids were there so we visited. They were in their mid and late 20s. We talked about when Ken and I were kids and we went to the same elementary school but 8 years apart. I guess they urged me on a little so I started to describe (naming the streets) how one side of Thouron Ave was uphill walking to school but the other side was uphill walking home from school and there were city policewomen crossing guards and the safety patrol there to make sure we walked on the uphill side. As I was telling them this load of crap, I took quick glances at their faces. I was telling them the exact same crap my brother had told them and it had been years since Ken and I had visited.
Oh, I just remembered an incredibly inspired falsehood that my parents tried to convince me of.
You know those whitish spots you get on your fingernails from time to time? (Or anyway, kids do; they seem far less common for adults.) I always had them, and one day I wondered out loud what caused them.
In a moment of sheer genius, my mother said, “That’s what happens when YOU TELL A LIE.”
I protested, as I was not aware of having told any significant lies recently, yet I had several white spots. Besides, what would be the science behind that? “Oh,” my mother said authoritatively, “It’s somewhat like how lie detectors work. When you lie, the stress causes brief fluctuations in heart rate and body temperature; this is reflected in the nail bed. Kind of like tree rings: scientists can see what years had warm summers or cold winters by looking at the cross section of the trunk.”
I still didn’t buy it, but my dad chipped in with more: “You know, this is how the tradition of giving a woman an engagement ring got started. When a man asked a woman to marry him, he would inspect her hands to make sure he wasn’t proposing to a liar. If her hands were clear and he found her worthy, the ring he gave her signified that she had ‘passed inspection.’”
I was still doubtful, but then my mother came up with an argument that did at least partly convince me: “You know why women wear nail polish? It’s to cover up the fact they’ve been lying.”
I was born with a full beard, my brother and I are identical twins born eleven years apart, and I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die are the only outright lies I use. I do use some humor punch lines (I’m the reason no-one in the family can have anything nice) but I don’t consider that quite the same thing.
I was driving around with my kids and my daughter pointed out I’d failed to come to a complete stop at a stop sign. I defended my driving, explaining that low risk intersections had stop signs with white borders. A full stop at these signs was optional.
As we drove, my daughter noticed other white rimmed stop signs and pointed them out. I thought she was playing along to fool her little brother. She confronted me a couple years later, a little pissed off. She’d believed me and only discovered the truth when the topic came up with her friends.
Goblins are real, they like hanging out in dark places, and they steal single socks at the slightest opportunity. I think I got 3 months out of that one.
“Mama, what is the dirtiest word ever?”
“Sophia, if I told you, Father Carlos would kick us out of church.”
“No he wouldn’t!”
“Yes he would. But you asked an honest question, so I will tell you what letter it starts with.”
*thoughts of dictionaries and google searches flash through my kids’ mind… * “Sure, Mama.”
“It starts with the letter… Z.”
Two weeks later my daughter was the country’s leading authority on words that began with Z.
I have a few. I convinced my then five year old, that the F-word was fiddlesticks. I also worked on convincing him that all judicial disputes in Alaska were settled by the Council of Bears in a judicial tournament to prove your innocence and to prevail in a civil suit.
