April Fools Rush In...

Image: GHotz, license: Fotolia.com

This year, I made two people cry on April Fools Day. Neither intentionally, of course.

The first was Sally. Every year I play a harmless, little trick on my children to surprise them and make them laugh.

But I've been known to get it wrong before. Like when Huckle was in third grade and I put a plastic bug in his lunch bag. Even though it was fake (and clean, and not actually touching any food), Huckle was so grossed out that he couldn't get himself to eat so much as a bite. Now he thinks it's funny, but at the time I felt terrible when my boy came home hungry.

This year I bought an Easter egg dying kit with colored tablets. On the morning of April 1, while Huckle and Sally ate breakfast and wondered aloud what I would do to their lunches (last year I put soda in their water bottles), I sneaked into their bathroom, unscrewed the aerators of their faucets, and then re-screwed them with colored tablets hidden inside -- red in Huckle's (because he thinks blood is wonderfully gory) and green in Sally's (because she thinks blood is horribly gory).

Huckle went up to brush his teeth first. I "folded laundry" outside the bathroom door until I heard a surprised "Hey!" and then a "Mo-ooooom" said in a smiling voice. "That's a good one, Mom." Red water from his faucet. Got him!

Sally came upstairs to find out why her brother was laughing and to brush her teeth. She wasn't happy that he clearly knew something she didn't. (Note to self:  that's a bad start right there.)

Sally's "hey!" sounded indignant. Her "Mo-ooooom!" sounded accusing. Huckle standing there laughing only made matters worse. "Mom, you made my toothbrush turn green!" she cried.

"That's funny," said Huckle helpfully.

"No it's NOT!" yelled Sally. "Everybody's making fun of me!"

The green washed off Sally's toothbrush; would her anger wash off too? Maybe she would find it funny some day, like Huckle and the lunch bug?

It hardly mattered since it wasn't funny at that moment or for the entire car ride to school, with Sally fuming in the back seat. Two strikes and I'm out, I thought. No more April Fools for me! What could be worse than making someone cry when you meant to make them laugh?

But I had already set another, bigger April Fools Day prank into motion...

Sally's third-grade teacher is a lovely woman gifted in encouraging her students. Every so often she fills out a special form called a Student Success Report to report a student's extra act of kindness or studiousness or neatness. "Sally truly impressed me with the effort she applied to her spelling practice..." a recent report noted. One copy gets signed and returned to the teacher; the other copy gets taped to our refrigerator door. A Success Report makes Sally's day.

Toward the end of March, as I closed the refrigerator door, I had an idea -- I would duplicate the success report but change it to a Teacher Success Report. The result looked pleasingly authentic. A PDF file of my fake was sent to every student in the class, so they and their parents could fill it out and return it on April 1. The instructions were to encourage the teacher, a hard-working woman with a toddler and twin infants at home and a room full of high-energy third graders at school.

After I dropped off a happy Huckle and steaming Sally at school on April 1, I thought about the bigger, more public prank I had set in motion. Ugh. If my little, harmless-seeming prank on the kids could go wrong, would the bigger prank go even more wrong? Would the kids write thoughtless notes to their nice teacher? Would the parents use the form to air hidden grievances? Had I committed forgery by copying the success report??

A sense of foreboding with lots of second guessing...

I found out later that the prank worked better than expected. As the students filed into the classroom, the teacher was handed Success Report and after Success Report until she held a stack of papers, each filled with kind words about her successes. The students were delighted to be in on this secret and took the task seriously.

And that's where the second set of tears enters into the story:  the teacher was so touched by the outpouring of love from her class and their parents that she cried. An added bonus: the children saw how much their encouragement meant to their teacher, and they positively glowed at her response.

On April 2, a new Success Report appeared on our refrigerator. It's a Parent Success Report created by Sally. It commends me for "making up this idea for teachers."

My lesson? Pranks can have unexpected results. Some good, some bad. Even a well-meaning prank is a risk. But some risks pay off big. 

I'm not sure how, or if, I'll celebrate April 1 next year. Of course, it's a silly holiday. But silly can be sweet, and sweet can be wonderful.

Sometimes...

A Month for Lightheartedness

April begins with a day devoted to pranks and continues on with more daylight, more green things popping up, more birds twittering and hopping and generally looking cute and comical. The dreariness of post-Christmas winter is over. Warmer, brighter times are here. I look out my window and see daffodils, one of the funniest, cheeriest flowers I know.

So I'm devoting any April blog posts to funniness.
Let's kick it off with some favorite family stories.

Swallowing Sally.
One day, when Sally was barely old enough to put together a sentence, I took a driving detour past our old house. It was the first house Husband and I owned. It's where we started out as idealistic pre-parents and then had our bubble burst when our finicky, colicky, wonderful Huckle arrived. I was three months pregnant with Sally when we moved three miles away to our current house.

I stopped the car at the curb of the quiet street. The house looked different to me, thanks to the much-needed landscaping the current owners had completed. There was no reason to expect the house to look familiar to Huckle. He was a few months shy of two years old when we left.

"I remember it!" Huckle announced excitedly.

"You do??"

He did. But it wasn't the house he remembered. He remembered the lawnmower shed peeking out from behind the house. I shouldn't have been surprised -- Huckle's first word was "lawnmower."

Sally listened closely as Huckle recounted our daily trips to the shed. Nothing delighted him more than sitting on the riding mower and pretending to drive. He also remembered how he and I would sneak to the shed as quietly as possible in order to spy on the family of mice that lived there. Animal-loving Sally listened with envy. She would have loved to swing that shed door open and watch the mice scurry away!

"Where was I?" demanded Sally from her car seat behind me.

"You were in my tummy," I told her.

Silence from the backseat.

Then Sally piped up in an indignant voice, "You mean you ATE me??"


Wise Words.
Huckle told me this story last fall. As soon as he entered the house after school, I could see he wanted to confess something. He had that guilty look...

The school principal had led the sixth grade class in a discussion of literature that day. Her topic turned to how life just isn't fair.

Huckle raised his hand. "My mom says that ALL the time," he announced.

(As he described this, I smiled approvingly. Kudos to me! Not only do I have the affirmation of knowing I say the same things as our school's wise principal, but now she has heard tell of the pearls of wisdom dripping from my lips.)

Later in the class discussion, another illustration of life's unfairness was brought to the class's attention.

The principal turned to Huckle. "Remind the class what your mother always says."

Huckle gave the class a comic frown and said in a prissy, bossy voice, "Do your homework! Clean your room! Practice your guitar!"

(I died of shame. And then laughed. It really IS funny.)