Pants-Free Parenting: Sometimes it’s fun to tease your kids

My son is 2 and likes to walk around the house waving a plastic hammer. 'I will fix this!' He yells smacking the hammer against the wall, chairs, my legs, or his sister whatever he has determined needs fixing that day.

He also has a toy electric drill that he likes to wield like a gun. He says nothing. Just purses his lips and glares while holding the drill in your direction. It's a threatening pose especially since I've seen 'The Wire' and 'No Country for Old Men' and I know how murderers can use tools. Also, I watched them while pregnant with my son, so I know the odds are good he knows as well.

A few days ago, my son grabbed his toy drill and crawled under the table. 'I will fix this!' He yelled. Our table is old. Hell, our whole house is old. Our house turns 92 this year and our table and the vast majority of our furniture are older pieces purchased from antique stores before we had kids and didn't realize how much they would destroy things.

As my son drilled the table, I watched him, laughing. He has probably seen my husband fix so many things in this house that he knows that everything is probably broken in one form or another.

When my son finished he yelled, 'OK dad, it you turn to screw under the table!'

I cackled like a witch. 'Honey, how do you think you were made?' I shouted.

My husband said nothing, he just put his lips together and sighed. 'Screw under the table!' My son yelled again.

'No thanks!' I yelled back.

This is the part of parenting no one tells you about: How much fun it is to mess with your kids. Like the other day I told my 4-year-old that the only thing we were eating for the next week was tomatoes, her least favorite food and I got to spend the next five hours listening to her say, 'Are you joking? Are you joking? Mom, are you joking?'

I remember my dad telling my siblings and me that marshmallows grew on a bush in Australia and that eggnog came from special Christmas cows who lived in the North Pole, had red and green spots and 'little bits of garland atop their stubby horns.' In turn, I told my sister Becky that the Statue of Liberty was a real giant, whose family had died off and in order to keep her from scaring the humans, the president had given her the job to pretend to be a statue.

She believe that one until she was 7 and hasn't forgiven me. Messing with my kids' heads is my absolute favorite part of being a parent. I mean yeah, sure, the hugs and love and watching them grow is great, but I can't wait until I tell them that there is no tooth fairy, only a tooth rat who sells their teeth to people who will turn them into necklaces. (That's another one of my dad's stories.)

As I stood there, musing on how much fun I was having, I noticed that my son had replaced his plastic drill bit with a purple crayon and had actually spent the last five minutes grinding purple crayon into the table legs. The kids won again.

• Lyz Lenz is a writer, mother of two and hater of pants. Email her at eclenz@gmail.com or find her writing at LyzLenz.com.