When you’re a parent, you should never be wrong. Because if you are, you will never live it down. Your children love it when you are wrong and will remind you of your mistake for years to come. I still remember a time when I was five years old and my parents were wrong.

My mom had made a batch of homemade cupcakes. She went into the kitchen after school one day and every one of the cupcake papers had been peeled away from the cupcakes. She was livid.

My two older brothers said they didn’t do it and I said I didn’t do it, so that left my one-year-old little brother. Yeah, he must have done it. We looked at my mom’s face and knew she wasn’t buying it. Then the dreaded words … “Just wait ‘til your father gets home!”

In my family, you didn’t want to wait until Dad got home. Waiting for him was punishment enough. We were all very good children all afternoon. We hoped Mom would forget to tell him.

No such luck. When he got home, he sat us down and said if one of us didn’t ‘fess up to the cupcake caper, we would all get spankings.

Somehow my older brother and I talked my #2 brother into taking the rap. He sheepishly walked info the living room and said, “I did it.”

My dad looked at him and asked sternly, “Why in the world did you do it, and why did you lie about it?!”

The pressure was too much. My brother crumbled and blurted out “Because they MADE me say it.”  Now my dad was so mad, his face was purple. Not a good thing to make your dad’s face purple.

Well, we all got spankings, I cried myself to sleep, and Mom made a new batch of cupcakes.

The next morning, all the papers were peeled off the cupcakes again. Turns out the humidity had done if.

For forty years, my siblings and I have brought up “The Case of the Peeling Cupcakes” on a regular basis and rubbed it in as best we could. Nope, it’s not good to be wrong when you’re a parent.