True and False

Lately I have been playing a game with Elli that I call True and False.  The way it works is that I tell her a story from my past and I add in one false thing.  Usually this involves me telling a story with three or four main points with one of those points being a fabrication and then she tries to guess which thing I lied about.  The most recent story was about my frosh week where I stuffed my face into a bowl of flour chasing some kind of candy, blew up an answering machine with explosives, and got pushed off a platform into a pool of water while wearing a blindfold.

The pushing off of the platform was the fake thing, which she got on the second guess.

It turns out that she is actually pretty good at this game.  Picking out the false thing from that list above is pretty tough because all three are completely plausible in the context of frosh week activities and Elli doesn't even know what frosh week is like!  Usually though she gets it right, like when I talked about taking my parents' small boat with an outboard motor out for a spin on the tiny rivers created by spring melt.  Canoeing on those rivers is totally reasonable but power boating, not so much.

In general this is just a fun way to pass the time and deal with Elli's constant desire for stories.  I eventually get tapped out of good ideas for new fairy and princess stories and adding in one odd twist to tales of my childhood is a lot easier.  I suppose eventually I will run out of amusing anecdotes but I haven't got there yet.  I will need to cap it off with a completely preposterous story where the entire thing is made up, just to keep her on her toes.

I generally like the idea of trying to demonstrate that people can make things up that seem completely real but aren't.  Children are so often told to believe everything adults say even when they are obviously ridiculous (See:  Santa Claus, Religion, Homeopathy, Trickle Down Economics) that I think a good dose of acknowledged lying is useful.  An inoculation against nonsense, I would call it.  Not that the rate of immunity is anything to brag about but even a little bit of doubt is a good and healthy thing to carry forward.

Whether or not it helps though it seems like good entertainment for us and that is sufficient reason on its own in my books.  The potential for education is just the cherry on top.