Kids are dumb...and liars

Yesterday, I'm in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher when I hear a loud pop.  I turn my head to see sparks flying all over the dinning room.  The culprit:  this outlet where the laptop cord, but not the laptop, was plugged in.  

I'll give you a second to pursue these pictures and guess which little hoodlum caused the damage.

What it this funny face?

Or this little soap face?

 If you said funny face Rex, you'd be right.

After the sparks stop, I went over to investigate.  Rex was standing near the plug as he had been standing at the table eating Cheerios before the incident.

Me: Rex, what happened?
Rex: I don't know.
Me: Did you touch it?
R: No.
M: Maybe you bumped it on accident?
R: No.  I didn't.
M: Maybe you spit on it by accident?
R: No. I didn't do it.
M: Are you sure?  I'm not mad (I really wasn't--I just wanted to know if our house was spontaneously combusting).  Maybe you had water on your hands and it dripped onto the cord?
R: No.  I didn't do it.
M: That's crazy.  I wonder how this happened.  You sure you didn't bump it just a little with your foot or something?
R: I did't.

I proceed to check all the lights in the house. We had no electricity.  I come back to the kitchen. By this time Rex had made is way to sink, when I noticed this in his hand.

That's a charred spoon with rivets where the prongs to the power cord and it collided.

M: Rex, did you maybe accidentally bump the spoon on the cord?
R: No. I said I didn't.
M: Rex, that spoon is burnt from touching the cord.
R: I didn't mean to!
M: I'm not mad Rex.  I just needed to know what happened.  Are you hurt?  Did you get shocked at all?
R: I'm fine.  I didn't mean to break it.
M: It's ok Rex.  We just have to flip the breakers and it'll be fixed, just don't do that again.
R:

Rex is fine.  I think the power cord took the shock from the spoon so Rex missed out.  Alice, however, was also in the dining room and I think she got hit by one of the sparks as she has a suspicious red mark on one leg.  She didn't cry though, so it couldn't have been that bad.

When Greg got home, Rex finally admitted that he was trying to use the spoon as a lever to pull the cord out because he was sick of having to step over it to get from his seat at the table to the sink.

Tomorrow's Family Night topic: honesty.  And electricity.