Wednesday, October 28, 2009

The Pyromaniac Among Us

My son, my darling boy, tried to burn the house down today. He was engaging in that ever popular kid sport, playing with matches. No actual harm was done to anything except his finger (which is blistered on the tip) but the potential is scary beyond words. What the heck do you do for that? What consequence can you mete out to let him know how very serious his behavior was and that he is never, ever to do that again?

And then to top it off, he lied over and over to me when I confronted him with the evidence. He said he didn't have any more matches but the entire box was stashed in the garbage can in his room; he also lied about where he found them in the first place. (He got them from a cabinet over DH's computer which he KNOWS is off limits, a cabinet I thought was safe. Obviously I was wrong. Nothing is safe from that child.) I can NOT tolerate lying; one of our top family values is honesty so I am upset beyond belief at that aspect of all this.

So now I have to come up with consequences. He's missing a festival Friday night for the matches and we're probably not going to let him trick or treat on Halloween for the lying. I am heartbroken; I love taking the kids around to trick or treat. I think this is a definite case of "this is hurting me more than it's hurting you".

1 comment:

Laika said...

That's a rough one to deal with, I'd say! What punishment did you decide on?