I LOVE April Fool's Day! Over the years, I've been able to pull of some pretty funny stuff. It gets harder and harder to out-do myself! My oldest is 12 and my other kids are 10, 9 and almost 2. It seems that this year, I will not be able to trick my older two. They're on to me. I'm looking for some fresh and new ideas. Here's what I've done in the past.....
1. When my boys maybe 3 and 4, I took my daughter's diaper, melted chocolate in it and went into the playroom. I told then I thought she was sick, but the only way to know for sure, was to taste her poop. I sniffed at it, made a face, and licked the chocolate! I thought my 3 year old was going to vomit right there. The looks on their faces...priceless.
2. I have gone in while they were sleeping and put little red marks/dots on their bodies. When they woke up, I told them they had chicken pox
3. I baked meatloaf "cupcakes" with pink and blue icing, which was mashed potatoes. They also had peas and carrots that tasted remarkably like Skittles.:)
4. I once picked them up from school and headed out of town. I began letting up on the gas a couple times and finally remarked that I thought we ran out of gas! I made them all get out and start walking to town. It was funny, until a car started to slow down, to ask if we were ok. The jig was up at that point.
5. One year, I told the kids someone stole our horses. It seemed funnier in my head, but saw that they were getting upset pretty quickly, so I didn't go far with it. Sometimes I get desperate.......LOL!
6. 2 years ago, I was 9 months pregnant and we woke the boys up early and told them I was in labor - they had to grab their hospital bags and head downstairs! They didn't buy it. My 8 year old said, "Guys, it's April Fools Day." He was only half awake, which is why I thought we could pull it off. *sigh*
LIke I said, it's getting harder and harder to trick these guys. Do any of you have some great jokes you've pulled off in the past? Especially for the older kids? Thanks!!!!
My mother actually send me a birthday cake to my dorm when I was in college. It was a service they provided but you had to sign up in September. She put serious thought into that one. But I will never forget it.
Ha. Your no 1. made me laugh. Hilarious. I could pull something like that on my husband.
Last year I got my mom (twice in one day) with the kitchen sprayer. I rubber banded it down, she got sprayed. We laughed. She took the rubber band off. An hour later I put it back on. She didn't laugh so much the second time. Tried the same thing with my husband that evening, but I kept accidentally spraying MYSELF b/c I forgot about it. So I took the rubber band off and forgot to put it back on when he got home.
But this year, I plan to get my husband with his hard boiled eggs. Every evening I pack his lunch for the following day. I pack him two hard boiled eggs and he eats them at work. I will replace the 'top' egg that he grabs with a raw egg. Hopefully it won't be too messy. His mom thought it was funny. So I hope he thinks so too.
Consider something like that? I bet you could do a google search for 'family friendly april fools jokes'.
personally, I think a lot of this would seem funnier if it were the kids doing it to the parents....seems a little mean to the kiddies. I feel the same way about America's Funniest Home Videos....if the child is the brunt of the laugh, then I don't think it's funny.
That said, here's some of our pranks: when my husband is asleep, I sneak into the bedroom & paint his toenails. If the timing is right, then my sons have been known to help. Then, & only then, do I "nail" the boys too.
Thru the years, both of my sons have taped down the nozzle on the kitchen faucet sprayer. Fun! & they plastic-wrapped the toilet! Gross.
We've Vaselined the toilet handle (& door knobs).
The daughter of one of my friends....went to her school principal & asked for her help. The principal called home & said that a letter was being sent home concerning the daughter's dress code violations. My friend was horrified & called me....all upset. & of course the letter said, "April Fool's"!!
The same friend's daughter came home from school with "head lice".....& a note from the school nurse. .....she used table salt on her scalp!!
Good Luck.
My mom was the champ. One year she served us "fruit punch" for breakfast. It was plain water dyed red, which tastes worse than you'd think when you are expecting punch.
Another year she packed "snickers bars" in our lunches. There were 5 of us kids in school at the time. The "snickers bars" were actually smooth black river rocks from her garden. She must have really searched to find rocks just the right size and shape to slip into the packages after she'd carefully removed the real candy bars. We NEVER got candy in our lunch bags so you'd think we'd be wise to her little joke. But we all fell for it; my mouth was watering all day thinking about the candy bar in my lunch bag. I was so disappointed when I unwrapped my rock, but even worse, when I got home from school expecting the real snickers bar to be waiting for me, my mom just laughed because she had eaten them all herself!
My mom thought this April Fools joke was so successful that she revamped the same prank for my youngest brother who hadn't been old enough to get a rock in his lunch the first time around. But this time, instead of a rock, my mother made a fake snickers bar out of flour and water playdoh, and dipped it into melted chocolate. It looked like the real candy bar so my brother took a big bite of it before realizing it wasn't.
When my son was in fourth grade, I told him that Mr. Pearl (his school principal) had called and told me what he had done. I was serious and looked him in the eye. I told him that he was definitely in trouble, but would be in less trouble if he confessed it to me. After each confession, I would say, "That's interesting, but that's not it." After he ran out of things to confess, I told him April Fool's.
I've done dessert for dinner - fish sticks made out of candy bars, ice cream for mashed potatoes, starburst candies shaped like peas; kids were little (4 or 5) when I did that and they still talk about it 4 years later. Last year I balanced a small bucket of water over my son's door, but he noticed it and hollered until his dad came to take it down. I've also colored water and passed it off as kool-aid, and put blue food coloring in the bottom of their cereal bowls so when they stirred it the milk turned blue.
This year I'm planning to pour their cereal the night before and freeze it, spoon and all. I'm also going to tape newspaper to totally cover their door frames so they have to 'break' out in the morning. Oh - and we bought a vuvuzela (annoying world cup horn) at a recent hockey game, so I'm waking them up 30 minutes early with the vuvuzela.
What a great mom. The kids will have wonderful memories of mom and her April Fools jokes.
I love practical jokes, and being the butt of them, but I'm not that good at pulling them off myself. I once told my kids for April Fools that they were going to Disneyland. I don't know how funny that actually is, but they still remember it and bring it up sometimes.
It's funny that your 8 year old already knows mom's tricks.
We do them every year. We have baked cotton balls into cupcakes. The secret is to put a little batter on the bottom and then the rest of the batter on top. Otherwise the cotton ball bakes at the top of the cup cake.
Made small pies out of cotton balls. Use small pie tins placed crust on top of a pan full of cotton balls and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar.
We gave the above to the school Principal and her teachers in elementary school.
Cement glued quarters all over the school sidewalks..
Our daughter purchased a bag of "Googly eyes" at the craft store.. They had sticky on the backs.. She placed pairs of eyes on all sorts of things. toothbrushes, door nobs.. anything that ended up looking like a face.
Do you ever buy scratch off lottery tickets? You could get one of the fake ones that says you win $10,000 big ones. You could scratch it off (in front of him so he isn't suspicious) and get all excited that you won, or even let your son scratch it and think HE won. Then you could even load up the car and act like you are going to go claim the money, and after driving about 10 minutes or so ask your 8 year old to read you the address from the back of the ticket. It usually says something like 'redeem at your momma's house...' or 'mail in with the tooth fairy...' stuff like that. :)
