The 30^th Olympics are officially underway. They are also officially not without cheating scandals. There are individuals, teams, and entire countries that will do whatever it takes to win the gold. This reminds me of the other day, when both my kids tried whatever they could to win at… wait for it… tic-tac-toe. Oh yeah, they cheated.*

As wrong as cheating is in any game or sport, at least the gold medal is a reason to cheat. And while winning is the main reason for cheating, I never taught my kids that winning was better than losing. I guess it’s just human nature to want to win, but who knew how kids were already wired to cheat as well?

How did my kids “cheat” at tic-tac-toe, then? By skipping the other player’s turn. By causing a distraction. By writing in the opponents next move. By any means necessary. Of course I corrected them every time, and let them know they were cheating, but that didn’t stop either of them. They just wanted to win, solely for the reason that they didn’t want to lose.

That’s not the only game they’ve cheated at, either. Here are some ways that the children of the Dad Vs. Spawn dads have attempted to cheat:

• By trying to win a foot race by grabbing the faster kid’s shirt.
• In a game where the kids are required to pick random pieces, the kids peeked at the ones they were taking.**
• Playing I Spy and spotting something red without actually making up her mind about what the red object actually was. Also known as Eternal I Spy.
• Kid cheated at Chutes and Ladders by manually pointing the spinner to “6,” thus incurring the “Spinner-must-go-around-at-least-once” rule.
• Hide-and-seek: counting to 20 much too fast. Difficult to adjust rules when 20 is the highest the kid can count.

* Without performance enhancing drugs, by the way, which would make for some interesting tic tac toe along with some extremely bad fathering.

** Kids are supremely bad at peeking secretly, by the way.

*** Yes, that’s a thing.