Two sides to every story

Yesterday, I overheard the boys yelling at each other outside, which is a pet peeve of mine because I don’t want our new neighbors to think we have a lot of dirty laundry that we tend to air outside, so I called them over. Immediately, they both started talking at me, so I told them to go upstairs to their rooms and write their own versions of the story. I pledged to read them and render a judgement. Here’s what I got:

Edison (delivered six minutes after the assignment was given):

Here is my order of events. NOT Clooney’s, MINE.

1) Clooney hits the hula hoop farther onto the basketball hoop with the baseball bat, when I tell him to just throw the basketball to get it down.

2) He says, “I’ll get it down!” just after I get the hoola hoop closer to me, and of course he uses the bat and pushes it right back to its original position.

3) I finally pull the hoop down, with great effort, and start yelling at Clooney for ruining EVERYTHING.

4) I say that he lies all the time and I tell him that he even lied when he was 4, because he pushed The Princess over and then said she just fell. I remember like an elephant.

5) He asks when he cried, and if I remember that well, and he used February for me to tell him. I say, “The 17th.” And he says, “NO! The 2nd, the 14th, and the 30th!” But there is no 30th of February, and that is my PROOF that Clooney is a liar.

And then I got Clooney’s (reluctantly, somberly, 20 minutes later):

Mom, if you ask me, Edison always starts it.

Classic.