If you are going to fool a child this April Fool’s Day, please remember a couple things. Children don’t get subtle jokes. They are more the slip-on-a-banana-peel or chicken/road type connoisseurs. It’s no fun fooling someone only after you’ve had to take ten minutes to explain why what you said or did was really funny. Children also aren’t fond of scary pranks, so no matter how funny it was when someone pulled it on you, think twice before sticking a fake horse head at the bottom of the bed or coming in the house limping, grabbing your throat gasping for air.
I still remember when I was little; my brother had taken a tiny box and poked a hole in the back of it through which he stuck his finger. If you took off the top, like I did at his urging, you would see what looked to be a finger lying atop the pillow of cotton home once to a little gold bracelet. He couldn’t have left it at that. A finger in a box. No, he had to drizzle ketsup over it to further convince me that this index digit got cut off and he was now destined to carry it around in a box for the rest of his life. I suppose that after a few minutes of my crying and screaming he probably pulled his finger out to reassure me that he, the brother I adored, was absolutely fine.
Another prank occurred just after I had fallen asleep in my safe, little all pink room. My brother somehow got hold of one of my physician father’s cigarettes and carried a puff of smoke from the living room to my bedroom in his mouth. He blew it in my face and yelled at me to wake up because the house was on fire. I hightailed it out of there, out the front door and into a darkness that only slightly hid the fact that I was in my baby doll pajamas. Yes, that‘s what they were called…pretty much underpants and a foofy flowered top. I turned around to wait for the smoke to introduce the coming of more smoke with an all out fire finale. All I saw through the no smoke was my brother and sister bent over laughing and rolling on the lawn pausing only long enough to point at me laughing, “I can’t believe she thought the house was burning down, can you?” Mission accomplished. They definitely made a fool of me.
An April fool.
