Happy April Fool's Day!

April Fool's "pranks" have been running rampant in our house for a week now... My 8-year-old daughter has learned a great number of tricks on the Disney Channel in the past week (in an interesting contrast, my nearly 3-year-old has learned to count to 10 in Spanish by watching "Go Diego, Go" -- hmm...). It started last weekend. My daughter came up to me and said, "Mommy, I'm going to go upstairs and make your bed, ok?" And I said, "You don't even make your own bed, why do you want to make mine?" And she said, "Oh, I just feel like it, that's all!" So, naturally I was suspicious... I went up to see what she was up to, and she had just finished making the bed -- did a pretty good job, I must say! And then I said to her, "Did you short-sheet my bed?" And she said, "No. What's that?" And then she told me, "I saw this on the Disney Channel, look!" And sure enough, she pulled back the covers and she had short-sheeted the bed! She said, "On tv they said not to do it to your own bed, and to do it to your brother or sister, but Kiki doesn't have that type of covers in her crib!" So, she helped me remake my bed and I told her, "This is called 'short-sheeting' and it's a fun trick to save for camp or sleepovers. You can do it to your sister sometime after she gets her first big-girl bed -- but wait awhile -- not the first night!"

After the bed incident, she replaced the soap in our shower with a plastic bar of babydoll soap. She told me about that one, and said, "I switched it to play a prank on Daddy! I put the real soap in my underwear drawer! I know that he'll take a shower tomorrow and see the play soap and say, 'I know who did this!'" So, I warned him that night so that he WOULD only say that, and nothing crabbier (at 4:30am when he was getting ready for work...)!

Once during the past week, I went to pour myself a bowl of my favorite cereal, and lo and behold, my little prankster had switched the bags of cereal inside the cereal boxes. She wanted to play a trick on Grandpa this past week and I helped her come up with the idea of putting his least favorite dvd into the case for one of his most favorite movies -- they both got a chuckle out of that.

I saw one of the "trickster tips" on the Disney Channel the other day -- it was the one about the bed trick. I will say this, all of the pranks that she learned from Disney were harmless and at least they ended the short-sheeting tip with "and be prepared to remake the bed afterwards!" My girl was all excited about this April Fool's Day and got so wrapped up in coming up with pranks -- it's fun to do that when they don't hurt anyone. And we were happy to be her willing targets this week!