I’m planning to pull a double-whammy on my family this April 1st.
A few weeks ago, I told my wife to block out a week in mid-April when our three kids (aged 7 through 11) have a Spring Break from school, so I could plan some kind of family vacation.
On the morning of April 1st, just before they go off to school, I’m going to tell them I bought plane tickets, hotel reservations, etc., for an 8 day trip to Orlando! Disney World! Universal Studios! The Wizarding World of Harry Potter! YAY!
…Ha ha, April Fools!
I’m so mean, right?
Then, that night, just before they go to bed, I’ll remind them of that April Fool from the morning. “Remember when I told you about the Disney and Universal trip I had planned, and then said April Fools!? Pretty funny, eh?”
Ha ha, April Fools again! I was fooling about the April Fools!
With any luck they won’t know WHAT to think until April 2nd.
If you’re going to do it, get your wife in on it beforehand. When you break the second April Fools on the kids, have proof of some kind in your hand, like a plane ticket or hotel reservation in your hand to show them the real story.
It can be done, but the trick is to not be soul-crushingly cruel about it.
My best gag was kind of lame. I was music directing a show, which means that I was pretty critical to its rehearsals and performances. I think we were opening on Friday, April 9th. Dress rehearsal on the 8th, of course.
On the 1st I sent an e-mail to the entire group, telling them that my boss was making me go on a business trip to Chicago on the 8th, but I’d be back that Sunday. Hope is won’t be a problem.
Only one person fell for it, but he got pretty panicky.
I don’t think it is a particularly interesting April Fools joke. You tell your kids one thing, they believe it. You tell them another, they believe that. Where’s the trick?
The point of an April Fools joke is to get someone to believe something unbelievable – something that couldn’t be true. Then you remind them of the date and they realize they’ve been had.
Here you are telling your kids a bunch of stuff that could be true. Why should they doubt it? I don’t know, maybe your kids are older than I realize, but it seems like a lame joke otherwise.
I don’t think it’s a good joke to play on your kids, either. To a kid, going to Disney World is like winning the lottery. Would you like it if you thought you’d won the lottery, and it turned out to be a joke? Would you be all “haha, good one!” I sure wouldn’t.
I would if it turned out that I did hit the lottery, after all… Depending on the delivery.
Well it DOES have to be something believable, or they wouldn’t believe it. If I said something like “well gosh darn, the sun rose in the West today! Wouldja believe it?” My kids would not believe it.
Saying the vacation plan is to Disney World, that they could believe, yet also know that it might not be true because we’ve discussed it several times in their lives and each time their mom has shot it down for non-financial reasons that are no longer valid (the youngest kid’s too young to remember it, we have something else planned for that particular break, etc., etc.).
In that, suddenly saying “oh wait we’re not going to DW” is not as crushing as it may seem, they know that most likely it just means we’d be going somewhere else for Spring Break, like Great Wolf Lodge in the Poconos.
And this thread was meant to hear other people’s ideas or suggestions too!
Suggestion: Leading up to April 1, start leaving little clues around the house. A magazine out in the open, turned to a Disney ad. A printout of possible plane flights to Orlando. Express complete ignorance of this. On April 1, really crank it up. Lots of Disney-related stuff. A new bottle of suntan lotion. Something new and travel-related (maybe wheeled bags for the kids). Keep denying that anything’s up. Then at the time of the big reveal, tell them that you have something important to tell them - you were planning a Disney trip on behalf of someone else (maybe their cousins, their friends down the block, someone they know) so it’d be a surprise for their family, isn’t that neat?! Watch the realization hit, then go “April Fool’s! It’s really for us, we’re going in two weeks!” Maybe show them the tickets with their names on them.
BTW the best April Fool’s gag in my family (post kids) was the time I dressed up a pillow in my then 5-year-old son’s pajamas, wedged it in a dark corner of my son’s bed (it helped greatly that he sleeps on the bottom of a pair of bunk beds), and told my son to sleep in my bed instead at bedtime. My wife was working late that night and got home about 30 minutes past his bedtime, and I told her he’d missed her so much he fell asleep crying. Well of course she rushed over to his room and started hugging and petting her “son”, without even turning on the room light… And about 5 seconds later screamed, “What the —?!”
For several days I dubbed the pillow my son’s “pillow brother” and named it Simon. Until my son gave it a vicious beat down on laundry day.
Taping down a co-worker’s phone and then calling their number is always reliable.
My father’s daily task was to let us know the morning temperature as we were dressing for school and he was on his way out the door to work. Every April Fool’s day, my older brother would fall for Dad’s lines. “Hey guys, you’d better put your long johns on - winter’s back,” Dad would announce. Or “Wow, short sleeves allowed today guys, it’s a warm one.”
Every year for about 8 years, Terry would dress as Dad indicated and then have to change clothes.
I work in a cell phone store. Last year our Sales Manager was the opener on April Fool’s Day. The night before the other opener called him and told him he was sick and wouldn’t be in the next day. The morning of April Fool’s one of the other guys called to say his wife was in labor so he wouldn’t be in that day. Then I called and told him I was in a car accident and probably wouldn’t be in either. Now the guy is thinking he has to man the store alone until the closers show up at 12:00.
At the time we had about 20 working phones on display. We set the alarm on one of the phones to go off at 9:14 with a message on the display that said “April Fools!” We then set 9 phones to go off at 9:15, 4 phones to go off at 9:17 and the rest at 9:18.
We weren’t done yet. We taped his desk phone so when he picked it up it would not answer a call. We popped the keys off his keyboard and rearranged them for him–that one was a good one because he was a hunt-and-peck typer. We also pulled his mouse cable out enough that it wouldn’t work but it looked like it was plugged in.
He was a fun guy so we went a little overboard but he got a kick out of it. None of us are looking forward to this April Fool’s because he’s going to get us back good.
