i have arrived as a parent, someone thinks i'm stupid

after staying home from work with a sick child (hallelujah-thanks kid!) all i wanted in the world was to have my pomegranate chocolate ice cream bar for lunch but when i went to grab it from the freezer-my bar had pulled a jimmy hoffa!  when hubby came home i asked him if he had eaten it, completely ready to perform a kitchen vasectomy on him it he had, but he feigned ignorance.  that left only one other suspect, a 12 year old vegetarian rock star wannabe.  but, when confronted with the loss of my glorious bar....total denial- he even went so far as to re-search the freezer for me, literally pulling every thing out probably praying the whole time that the anti-butt whooping fairies had replaced it for him.  but to his complete surprise there was no bar.  he still denied that he ate my damn bar.  he denied eating the bar later when he was in the car with hubby, getting more and more wound up in his little chocolaty lie.  a little preface to the story is that this kid is sensitive, very sensitive.  the slightest look or wrong intonation in your voice and you can send this kid into full on a big fatty fatty tears blubbering you don't love me freak out (trust me, i've done it.  i am the queen of wrong intonation.) and on that note, about an hour after the little chat in the car with dad about how lying is bad, this is a matter of trust and unless someone broke into our house and bypassed the computers, keys to the cars and the huge assed tv and went right to the fridge for a little frozen goodness you were the only one who could have done it-nothing.  an hour later the kid called hubby in total hysterics and admitted he messed up.  here is where i am torn.  two hours after the initial lie now we have to come up with how to actually deal with this cuz even though kids are cool and shit and hopefully one day they will return the favor and change my diapers, when they fuck up we gotta punish them. and even though i favor locking them in a box, again there's that whole social service thing.  i am torn because i so remember being in the same place as this kid, well not them exact same place because i didn't have a hot step-mom and i didn't steal an ice-cream bar mine was more like a litre of cheap vodka that my dad kept hidden behind his Folgers.  i can still remember the feeling that if i just kept lying that the lie would become the truth and that my baby sister would come tottling down the stairs with an empty booze bottle and a blood alcohol level higher than her age.  but, in the back of my head i knew that my friends and i had mixed the bottle with mountain dew and passed out on our holly hobbie sleeping bags the night before.  i think that the only thing that i am having trouble with, not the parenting, not the punishing but rather the fact that when i thought my parents were stupid, they weren't just stupid THEY WERE OLD AND STUPID!  goddamn kids, i'm going to have to find some big boxes.