"I'm the Winner!"

I've started to notice something interesting with Norah lately. It's been something that has developed so slowly in her that I almost failed to notice it happening. She is a pathological liar and cheat.

Now, when I say that I "failed to notice it happening," that isn't to say that I haven't noticed her lying. I do. All the time. SUPER all the time. But it started out as just regular Norah silliness, and now I'm beginning to wonder if I'm not starting to see the budding of a possibly nefarious personality type.

Let me explain. First, she's turned into something of a storyteller. I, obviously, take credit for this as I have encouraged both of our kids, throughout their young lives, to tell me stories. Like the story of the Buried Queen. Have I shared this already? If not, it really needs to be documented, so I better share it again. Just skip ahead if I'm repeating myself.

Over a year ago, they tore down our Dairy Queen. It was sad to see it go, but it was, honestly, a dump. The service was worse than terrible and the food had gotten pretty unreliable. Whoever owned it had obviously given up on life. It needed to be done away with. Still, there is something inherently awful about the closing of an ice cream store. One day, I pointed it out to Norah. "Look!" I said, "They tore down the Dairy Queen!"

"The Buried Queen?" Norah asked. And from then on, that is what it became, and every time we drove by it (which was often since it was on Main Street), I had her develop the story of the Buried Queen.

Here is how the story ended up after several weeks of careful plot and character development.

There once was a queen. She was very evil. She owned an ice cream store and she made her ice cream out of poop and pee and hate.

Side note: For awhile now, when asked, "What words are bad words?" Norah has responded, "Poop and pee and hate," and always with a slight southern drawl on hate, like "Hayte." Not sure where she got that list, but that is her list of bad words. When asked, "What words are good words?"  Norah always responds, "Studio." She cannot say WHY "studio" is a "good" word. But it is.

Anyway, the Queen fed people ice cream made of poop and pee and hate, and the people were not fond of this ice cream. They were so unfond of the ice cream that they buried her in the ground. But the Queen had an undetermined number of daughters. These daughters were sad that the queen was bad, but they were not bad. Apparently, they had no problem with the moral dilemma of burying their queen mother under their castle and then living in that castle, either, because that's what they did. With the help of Mr. Matt (the teacher's assistant at the preschool), the princesses decided that they were going to make their own ice cream and be good princesses and give the ice cream to preschoolers everywhere. They made this "good" ice cream out of, you guessed it, studio. Yet, despite the fact that they made building flavored ice cream, everyone loved them and they lived happily ever after.

This is the official version now, though I think some of it was embellished just now when I asked Norah to help me remember all of the details. There you have it. Ever the perfectionist, honing her story as she goes.

Over the last month or two, though, she's gotten to be more than just a storyteller. It's morphed into something kind of annoying and rather persistent.

Let's say she has two options, and both options will have a mundane outcome. Like, just a few minutes ago, she ran up to me while I was making a panini for a customer (I'm at the store, I don't have customers coming to my home asking for grilled sandwiches) and said that she needed to go to the bathroom. The toilet here is still tall enough that she can't crawl onto it without a little help, so she kind of can't go unless someone helps her up. I told her that I was busy but she should go into the bathroom and try to get on the toilet herself and I could help her when I was finished. Instead of going into the bathroom, she ran back to where Gabe was playing and went back to work jumping off the raised area in the front window, pretending to be a butterfly. Five minutes later, I finished with the customers and asked her if she still needed to go to the bathroom.

"Nope!" she said.

"But how is that possible?" I asked. "You didn't go into the bathroom. You just came over here."

"I just peed on the floor," she said.

"Um, what?" I knew this wasn't true as she wasn't covered in pee. She doesn't have the coordination to pull her pants down and not pee on herself unless it's into a toilet.

"I made a little potty here in the middle of the floor" (spooky, right? She even recognized that she couldn't just pee on the floor but would need a potty to not get it all over herself so she modified her story to match up more closely with reality--she's a bit of a natural at this) "and then when I was done I took it back to the bathroom and dumped it in the toilet and flushed it away."

A pretty serviceable lie, if not for the fact that she would have had to walk past me to dump this potty in the toilet, which she obviously didn't. I pointed that out and she smiled, knowing she was busted, but she was completely blase' (sorry, I have no idea how to make accent marks) about it. Still, she put together a basic story with all of the elements intact. If she'd thought it through to the "walking past dad to get to the bathroom" part and come up with some other way to get rid of her imaginary potty, it would have been a pretty solid lie (well, if there was a feasible way for her to create a potty out of thin air, I suppose).

See? She had nothing to gain by it, but she did it anyway. Possibly a bit worrisome. Again, as I've said before, having a well-developed ability to lie will probably only help her in her future life. But that doesn't mean that I want her doing it to me. So I'm going to have to figure out a way to nip that in the bud.

But lying isn't all of it. She's also a cheating cheater who cheats. When she first figured out that she could buckle her own seat belt, we started having a "contest" pretty much every time we got in the car. For practical reasons, mostly. Without the impetus of the contest, she tends to dawdle. There's another "tradition" we have to help speed the kids putting their belts on. It started when Gabe first started doing it on his own. For a short time before that, Norah had this thing she did to torment Gabe. She'd ask, "Would you like a wet finger?" Then she'd stick a finger in her mouth and wipe it on him. To help encourage him to get his seat belt on, we made it a rule that, if the belt hadn't clicked into place by the time we pull out of the driveway, then he would receive a wet finger. This was expanded to include Norah when she started putting her belt on, but she has about zero tolerance for receiving wet fingers (often resulting in crying fits when Gabe starts to threaten her with them), so the contest was developed as encouragement for her.

As the weeks past, she began to grow tired with occasionally losing this contest to Gabe as he was more adept at putting his belt on. So she often declares that "it's not a race!" Specifically, she declares this every time it looks like she might lose the race. And it happens with other races. Often she and I will race to the car when we're leaving the store (as she has a tendency to stop and examine pretty much anything that happens to be in the middle of the alley or parking lot and it can take ten minutes to get to the car if she's not spurred on to win a race). But, lately, she's been adamant that we're not racing, unless she has a good ten foot lead before we even start.

Today, she did exactly this as we walked up to the store. She was about ten feet in front of Gabe and I, and she shouted, "It's a race!" Neither Gabe nor I even made an attempt to catch up to her because we were carrying the many, many bags full of toys and electronics they both require to keep them entertained for the hours that we're here at the store. She made it to the door first and said, "I won!"

"But you cheated," I pointed out. "You didn't call the race until there was no chance that we could catch up to you. That's called cheating, when you rig the race so that you are the only one that wins. Nobody wants to play with a cheater."

"No I didn't," she claimed.

"Yeah. You did. That means you're a cheater."

"I'm the winner!" she countered sagely. And that's the point that worries me. Even though she's still very young, I'm pretty sure that she is already capable of weighing the moral dilemma of cheating versus the tiny thrill of winning a contest, and she has chosen to win over choosing to play fair. I know that sounds like a complicated concept for an almost four year old to grasp, but she's a shrewd one. One of nature's manipulators. And, lucky me, I get to try to figure out a way to convince her to do the right thing instead of always being the winner. A task that my particular moral flexibility might not be best suited to accomplish. Guess we'll see.