What April Fools?

  I was reading another blog where the author was saying that her one attempt at a good April Fool's prank this year didn't work out so well for her.
  That got me thinking about some of our past April Fool's pranks and made me feel slightly disappointed that I didn't even make an effort this year. What's happening to me?
  Since I failed this time around, I thought I'd share some favorites from years past - when pulling off the ultimate prank used to be a huge deal and all of us kids generally teamed up to do something to Dad - don't worry, it wasn't so one-sided since he had many extra resources, not to mention quite a few more years of experience than we did at that point.
  First off, I must say that as a young, annoying kid, I didn't get much more of a thrill than that excitement of scaring someone to death as I'd jump out of doorways or dark halls, or places like that.
  One of our favorites was the time the YM were at our house to carve pumpkins; I was not even 12 yet, so I guess that means I could get away with stuff like this. Anyway, all the boys had gone out to the garage to start carving, except for one guy - the bishop's teenage son....my helpless victim.
  He went upstairs to use the bathroom, which is conveniently located right next to my room. The house was quite and mostly empty (Mom was all the way downstairs at that point), so I stealthily laid at the bottom of my bedroom door, tucked back into my room where he couldn't see me when he came out of the bathroom.
  As he emerged into the silent hallway, I sprang out at him while making a ton of noise (I'm not good at screaming, so it was probably more like the sound of an attacking gorilla). I think I quite possibly put him into cardiac arrest for a few seconds. Everything that happened after that is a blur and I can't even remember if he jumped, yelled, or possibly both. But it must have been good because I do remember laying right there in the hallway and laughing so hard that tears were running down my face and I could hardly breath.
  He tried to pull off a quick recovery, I mean, I had just damaged the pride of an extremely cool teenage guy (riiiight...).
     The only other part I remember was that as I lay there laughing like a maniac, he made his way down the stairs and without hardly even looking at me, he mumbled just loud enough for me to hear,
     "Jerk..."
 I knew that was his severed ego talking and I only laughed harder!! Mom even came up laughing and repeating him as we both tried to catch our breath. Ahhh...
  Of course that was the first story we told his brand new wife several years later at their reception. He still wasn't laughing.

  That's how I was though. I was always creeping up on people trying to scare them. I got one of my aunts pretty good once by crawling through rows of corn up to where she was weeding, then screaming out at the last minute. Those were the days.....

  With that brief history, let's get back to April Fool's stuff.
Dad was pretty good and he even went to such lengths as injecting gummy fruit snacks with tons of food coloring, then putting them out for us to eat. The best part was, none of us ate them before our neighbor, Jordon (who used to be at our house all the time) got to them first!
  Another time Dad tried swapping our regular milk with buttermilk - but somehow that failed and none of us ended up drinking it.
   But I don't know how many times (April Fool's or not), Dad has had to go change into a new work outfit before leaving the house since he ended up getting soaked by the handiwork of us taping the sprayer on at the kitchen sink.
  There's always the ol' "leave an open can of tuna under the seat in the car" trick, which we've also done on a few occasions to Dad before he left for work. Or the plastic wrap taped at eye level over doorways. Who doesn't love walking into that?!
   One of our most successful pranks (because let's face it, some pranks are only good in theory: Kool-Aid powder in the shower head, for example) was the time that Dad had a bottle of clear shampoo down in his shower.
  Wanna know what looks like clear shampoo?.....Karo Syrup. Oh yes.
We poured his real shampoo into a jar and hid that somewhere else in the bathroom, then we filled his shampoo bottle with Karo syrup. He later told us - again, as we were all dying laughing - that after about the third time of trying to get his "shampoo" to lather up, he realized that something wasn't right.
  Score 1 for the kids!
So in the end, despite many years of failed attempts, there have also been a few shining moments in our April Fool's history; the kind I can look back on and be proud of.
   And just remember one thing, you're never too old or mature, to get a little satisfaction from jumping out of a dark hallway into the path of an un-suspecting passerby. Go ahead, find out what I'm talking about!