The first lie is always the hardest....

2 years, 8 months and a few days.

That's exactly how long it took my lovely daughter to tell us her first lie. Actually let me rephrase that...it's the first time we caught her in a lie. Since the fact that this one came so naturally to her (almost as if she's had weeks of practice) that it wasn't technically her "first" ever. What was the motivation behind this lie to begin all lies? Chocolate, what else? (I mean she is a female after all). We had just finished supper and Ally doesn't finish her meal. "Ally you need to finish your supper if you want any dessert" I say reviewing our fairly consistant meal time rules. Ally decides to not finish (not really touch actually) her turkey burger. Mommy decides to finish off her meal with a square or two of our favorite chocolate. Ally clearly wants more than anything to follow suit. "Ally honey, if you want a piece of chocolate you need to finish your burger" my Wife says. Ally goes back to the table, pushes the food around on the plate decides she'd much rather save room for chocolate than actually eat any more of her supper, so the bargaining begins. "I want some chocolate, I eat it all"..."Actually Ally I don't see that you ate very much of your burger at all"...."Yes I eat it all...I want chocolate"..."No Ally you need to finish your sandwich"..."No yucky, I want chocolate"..."I'm sorry Ally if you don't finish your meal, you won't get any chocolate"....then it happened..."Daddy said I could".

And that's how it starts. I'm thinking when did this happen?...or maybe the better question is How long has this been happening? Needless to say Ally didn't get any chocolate until she finished her supper, but I couldn't help but feel we'd reached some sort of developmental mile stone. One that parents magazines and doctors offices don't keep tract of....smiling?...check, crawling...check, walking?...check, talking?...check, LYING?...check. I couldn't help but feel a bit of a failure as a parent, here is my 2 3/4 year old daughter lying to her parents...for a piece of chocolate....great. I guess in the big scheme of things, throughout her life she'll lie hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, hopefully she gets worse at it (she was pretty convincing, I was even thinking...when did I say that?) or we get better at seeing through her...but at the end of the day we just want Ally to know she doesn't need to lie to her parents, she'll get her chocolate one way or another.