My Kid Can Get Your Kid to Pee on Furniture...and My Other Kid Will Tattle on Him

Last Saturday, my rockstar friend Cindy invited me and three out of my four kids to eat dinner at her house. The plan was to let the kids play and to enjoy some much needed and hard to come by time hanging out with a good girlfriend. God bless her husband, who not only cooked burgers and hotdogs, but also endured a noisy dinner that involved getting up multiple times and chewing our food to the backdrop of fart jokes and fake burps.

After dinner we migrated to the backyard, where a fire pit sat popping and waiting for eager little ones to roast marshmallows. When the kids emptied the first bag and retreated inside to play, the grown ups broke out a second bag along with a pack of graham crackers and the largest chocolate bar I've ever laid eyes upon. I was bulldozing my way through my third s'more when Lawson burst through the screen door and declared his friend had peed on the couch.

What?! As the Pre-K teacher of Cindy's son, this little story seemed highly unlikely. Cindy's husband went upstairs to investigate, and I warily did a mental checklist of which Jones boy might have inspired this new development. When her husband returned, he detailed pee puddles on their couch and chair upstairs. When we asked in shocked voices (well, mine was really mock shock because I had already braced myself for what was coming) why he did it, the explanation was simple: Hudson and Lawson told me to do it.

I took the march of shame into the house to call down my little instigators. When I posed the question, "did you tell you friend to pee on the couch?" Lawson looked me squarely in the eyes and said no. Hudson, on the other hand, looked squarely at the spot on the wall above my right shoulder and answered the same way as his brother. Seeing an opening, I admonished Lawson for telling his friend to do such a thing, to which Hudson adamantly responded, "Lawson didn't say anything!"

Lawson was off the hook, so I posed the same question to Hudson. With wide-eyed indignation and a firm hold on his innocence, he declared, "I didn't tell him to pee on the couch! I told him to pee on the stairs!"

Sigh. Not only did my second born child inspire his buddy to do something totally out of character (which by the way is also totally out of character for Hudson), my third son felt it was his civic duty to march downstairs and totally rat him out. Their buddy got a time-out, and my little man will be working on an apology note to his friend this week. I can't help but find humor in the situation, but I know I do so at the risk of undermining the hilarious inappropriate nature of the offense. Needless to say, I will host the next gathering so that any errant urination is at my expense. It's the least I can do.