Lying stepson

After what has seemed like a pretty good summer with my stepson, he is turning into a real liar. I'm not sure what the deal is, either. When we first got him this sumemr we went to where me and my husband call home to visit with our dads and siblings. This was around father's day and we all had a good time even though on the way down there my car decided it had had enough and we ended up having to spend a lot of the time on vacation renting and then buying a car.

Given all that, I can honestly say we all had a really good time, good enough that as we were heading back here, my stepson was saying how he wished we could live there.

Then came Kansas City with the school trip that me and my husband had to go on. We purchased J. a separate package so he could go with us and we really all had a pretty good time except for my separate frustrations with the competitions and issues with my students. My husband took J. to a baseball game (the Royals stadium was right across the street from our hotel), they spent copious amounts of time in the waterpark that was located IN the basement of our hotel, and we went to an amusement park during the trip. My stepson even had a great time at the actual competiion, trading pins and just hanging out.

Then we came home and he went back to his mom's. Yesterday was the first time we had gotten him since we got back from KC and everything was still going great. My husband wanted to go fishing so after we picked J. up we went and bought minnows, went out to eat, and then came home. Once home, my husband and J. rigged up some poles and hooked up the boat. J. had dinner and they were in the living room watching a movie. Then J. got on the phone with his mom and came to his dad crying saying he wanted to go to his mom's because "he hadn't seen her in 16 days", which was a bold-faced lie. Actually, he had been with her the day before and had only spent the night with his grandmother before we picked him up.

So, she came and got him. It wasn't until later that my husband found out that J. had gotten on the phone and told her that my husband was drunk (another lie) and tht he was cussing him out (lie) and that he was scared my husband was going to "hit him upside the head" (I'm not sure where that came from since my husband doesn't lay a finger on that child). He also told her that we didn't feed him dinner (uh, we took him out to eat and then he ate again when we got home) and that we wouldn't let him call her (bullshit).

I'm sick of his lies and, frankly, I'm sick of him and his mom. I am tired of investing myself emotionally and financially in his well-being when all he is turning out to be is an ungrateful, manipulative, liar. I'm not quite sure what to do. Logically, I know I should just play it off and act like nothing is wrong, but I really don't know if I can do that. That child needs to be punished, he needs to see that there are repercussions to his actions and that he cannot get away with saying slanderous things about his father. I really don't know what to do and I don't know how to help my husband with all of this. I know it hurts him, even though he says that he doesn't care if J. comes back over or not. I know it kills him.

The worst part is, I really have no idea what caused all of this. Everything was going so great and then this happened all of a sudden. Things between all of us were going so well and then this just seemed to come out of nowhere.