Dramatic Magnets

T decided to play a little prank yesterday and won himself an X-ray at the ER. He walked up to his teacher and said he's swallowed some magnets (spherical gumball sized magnets). Then he laughed and said he was just kidding and showed the teacher the magnets in his hand. This is pretty typical for T and wouldn't have been a big deal if a couple of his friends hadn't claimed that they saw him swallow magnets. The magnets in his hand were the typical metallic color and his friends claimed he swallowed the "colored" ones. At this point it was T's word against his friends and T maintained his stance that he didn't swallow them. I talked to him on the phone and was 99.9% sure he didn't swallow them. However, after talking to my supervisor who also has little kids I took her advice and called our pediatrician. She recommended that since no with impeccable credibility could vouch that he hadn't swallowed the magnets that he should to go the ER and have and X-ray to be sure because magnets can cause very severe damage. The Scoot took him to the ER, and as expected the X-ray was clear. We had a little chat about how one always needs to tell the truth in order to always be believed. I feel that I can usually extract the truth when something is important like this and I so wanted to believe him, but in this case we just had to be sure. Poor kiddo. Hopefully this object lesson in truthfulness will help set him on the path to a truthful existence. I should also point out that he's a ridiculously good kid and that is probably less devious than many 4-year-olds, but he does like to play jokes.