APRIL FOOL!

You know, I kind of like kid holidays. I like to surprise my family; and I like how clever I feel when I do it well. :-) (Yes, that is the real me.)

So I've been planning for this April Fool's Day since last year. Seriously; that is not a joke. I really have been planning this day for an entire year. I'll give you the run-down:

Unfortunately the first joke of the day was on me. Yes, I woke up to a gray, snowy, ucky mess outside. A slippery mess that I had to drive in first thing this morning. Bruce and I had a lot of running around to do this morning. First I had to take the kids to school, then go pick up Bruce from the mechanic, and then go to my cousin's house to get our hair cut. That would be 35 to 45 minutes of driving on a perfect day. It took an hour and fifteen minutes on those slick, slick roads. UGH!

my view out the front windshield this morning

But I delivered the first joke of the day to my kids. I woke up at 7:00 a.m, as usual; this is the time that I normally get the kids up to get ready for school. But I was inspired this morning; today I ran to every room and hollered, "Get up quick! Dad and I slept in—it's ten minutes to eight!!" Then I ran back to my room; after I was dressed I did the rounds again, "You guys! Hurry!!! We have to leave in five minutes!" Lindsey did catch me and say that her clock said it was only 7:15. "Well, your clock must be wrong." I said—almost with a straight face.

When Michael (usually the last face I see in the morning) came upstairs, he said, "Mom, it's not even 7:30 yet."
Then I had to laugh. And, "APRIL FOOLS!" say I. ;-) Michael tried not to, but I caught him with a little smile on his face.

Well, after the timely joke of the morning, we had the fun driving adventures. And after that it was pretty calm until dinner time—time for the joke I've been planning for a whole year. See, last year I was looking around online, at the last minute, for an April Fool joke to play on my kids and I saw this terrific dinner idea. The trouble was that I had to order one of the food items online; no way I could do it for last year. So I bided my time.

Check this out: This may look like an ordinary TV dinner, but no . . .


. . . The mashed potatoes are vanilla ice-cream with caramel topping; the peas are from a bag of "peas-n-carrots" candy; and the chicken nuggets are Hostess donettes, sliced to the appropriate size.

I saw the whole dinner on the Family Fun website last year. While I liked the looks of the mashed potatoes and peas (I could only get the peas-n-carrots online); I couldn't find peanut-butter logs to use for the chicken nuggets. And it took a long time for me to come up with something that would really look like chicken nuggets; I was pretty tickled when I thought of the donettes.

On the Family Fun website they just served the whole thing up on dinner plates—the TV dinner trays were my own idea. (And it was a neat trick to save ten TV dinner trays without my whole family getting suspicious.)

To top it off, I actually made real breaded chicken, real mashed potatoes and gravy, and real peas for dinner—er, dessert. Bruce, who saw me breading the chicken before dinner, thought that my joke was simply to put the meal I'd prepared on the TV-dinner trays. No one was prepared for the "dinner" they got.
Surprise! APRIL FOOLS!

(But now I may need to start planning for next year.
Who's the real April Fool?)