Parents of the Year? Nah.

OK, we're probably not the world's best parents. It has recently been brought to our attention that all four of our children can pinpoint the exact day that they had the argument.

It started innocently enough. Really, it was just a joke, but one that served our purposes as parents. One night when I wanted to convince my oldest daughter to take a bath, I told her that she had to scrub between her toes to get rid of the toe spiders. See, I had this vision of it being so long since she took a bath that the spiders had built webs between her toes. Sort of my version of my mom telling me that my ears were so dirty she could plant potatoes in them.

But she believed it, and toe spiders passed into the pantheon of imaginary entities of our children's world: the Jellybean Fairy (who was sometimes discovered to have left a jellybean in Dad's office during the next visit, and who later lost all restraint and started leaving them all over the place), the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy, and so on. As with other members of the pantheon, occasional expressions of doubt about toe spiders were met with the embellishments and excuses necessary to keep the story plausible. They're pretty small; you're keeping your toes clean enough that you don't have any now. Any little unidentifiable speck between the toes could be a bit of web, you never know.

To be honest, it occurred to us that if this belief went on too long, say, into the upper elementary grades, it could prove to be a social liability. But we felt that, like the Jellybean Fairy, toe spiders would have the good grace to just fade away when the time came.

But no. As it turns out, each of our children told us, some months or years after the fact, that they had had arguments -- serious arguments -- with good friends about whether or not there were toe spiders. They all lost, of course. And eventually they realized that their parents were liars. I think they've all accepted it as a character flaw that isn't entirely our fault: we probably can't help ourselves. But we notice they look at us with funny expressions when we tell them they actually need to file tax returns every April 15, or that it takes 30 years to pay off a typical mortgage. You can see them thinking: Is this another one? If I tell this to someone else, will they laugh in my face?

So it's our fault that our children had these difficult and somewhat embarrassing exchanges with their friends. But we couldn't help but laugh a little -- actually, a lot. It didn't help our case much.