And we thought the worst of it was out of the way…
Turns out that all day while the boy knew he was in trouble for taking the cookies in the first place, he had lied about eating them all and had hid about 2/3 of the tube in the couch cushions. That’s right, while getting in trouble for lying and stealing, he had been concealing the spoils of his crime, and continued to lie about things.
It came out when my wife thought to check the trash can he had been using to see if he had been taking other things without permission, and there were no cookie tubes. There was, however, a bunch of half-eaten food and nutritious snacks he had previously said he ate all of. We asked where he had disposed of the trash and he got evasive. After being threatened with digging through all his belongings he had he finally confessed that he stuffed the empty tubes between the couch cushions – but there was more than just that.
In addition to the five empty cookie tubes, there were also the remaining cookies from his earlier theft, along with a couple bowls worth of Cheeze-Its and Goldfish that he had spilled and not cleaned up. The “four or five times” he helped himself to the cookies wasn’t just taking a few here and there, it was taking whole tubes and concealing the evidence.
Again, if this were just about cookies, even I’d think we might be overreacting a bit, but this is about the dishonesty and deception, as well as the flagrant disregard for the only boundary my wife set for him.
I made him call and confess to his parents, and they were pissed. He had to call and confess earlier in the day, but I had him do it again to tell them that he had a bunch of the cookies hidden the whole time everything was going on. This was such overt dishonesty and disrespect, that it felt like another complete confession was due.
So now he has no more privileges – no more tablet time, no more TV or movies, and no more video games. He gets to sit on the porch and practice his alphabet or copy paragraphs from a kid’s version of The Odyssey. I’m irritated that I took his Nintendo Switch in for repair and will have to pay for the labor even though it likely is shot because he spilled pop on it but didn’t say anything when it could have been cleaned – especially now that he wouldn’t get to use it now even if it worked perfectly.
We have three more weeks with him here, and I can only hope that he gets his act together in that time. That said, it really is difficult to rebuild trust after one has abused it…
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