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**I wrote this on April Fool’s day, but couldn’t post it until now, I’ve got some great pictures to post with it once I get this issue fixed**

Anyone who knows my brother Bryan, knows that April Fools Day may be the most  important day of the year—at least to him.  He loves not only to play jokes, but to have them played on him.  He eagerly awaited my bedtime last night so that he could get started.  Even now as I write, he’s feverishly trying for just one more prank.

Last night’s preparations yielded missing wheels on my computer chair, a missing remote which once found was missing it’s batteries, my shoe laces tied together and hidden DVDs.  I tried a few quick pranks by switching out the bags on some of the cereals and covering the shower nozzle in saran wrap before we left the house for his orthodontist appointment.  He got braces today which presented me with a prime opportunity to prank.  I made up a list of food that he wouldn’t be allowed to eat with his new braces, the list included as many of his favorite foods as I could think of.  I gave it to the lady at the front desk who read it to him before we left.  The best part was probably the look on the faces of the other patients, mostly children as they overheard this list of forbidden foods.  He played his own jokes on them by smearing peanut butter on his teeth before the appointment and putting pink hair gel in his hair.

The kids got into the spirit of things.  I had told them that April Fools Day was a special day for playing jokes on uncle Bryan.  Isaac’s first idea was to ‘twist uncle Bryan’s head  around.’ Bryan leaned down, but Isaac found that he couldn’t turn Bryan’s head as he had wished.  His next idea was to hit Bryan with a cardboard tube, as he did this he laughed and said “I joked you!”  As I was changing Nicole’s diaper he came in with the idea that his next joke should be a ‘scratching joke.’  I did my best to explain what a good joke is comprised of.  Later, I helped them with a few.  We froze a pair of uncle Bryan’s underwear, put baby oil on the door handle, and used a cable organizer to tie his shoe laces together.  Isaac seemed to get a better idea after this, his next idea was to put bubble solution on the door handle.  At lunch, he was proud of his idea to turn uncle Bryan’s plate upside-down.  Soon he was saying things like “you have a stinky on your hair.”  We played lots of little jokes on him, some of them more obvious than others.

I used an old trick I learned at eBay by changing the background of his computer to a picture of his desktop so that when he tried to click on things, they wouldn’t work.  This prank was successful twice.  Probably the biggest prank of the day is when we successfully convinced him that my mother is pregnant.  He didn’t believe it when she told him, but I could tell he had his doubts.  I had prepped him earlier in the week by making an off-handed remark about how I thought it would be funny if mom was so lonely without him that she had another child.  It launched us into a conversation about whether it was possible.  I led him to believe that, although she had hit menopause, there was a very slim possibility that she could still get pregnant.  When he showed signs that he wasn’t entirely sure mom is not pregnant, I encouraged the story by telling him that when she told me earlier in the week and that I encouraged her to wait until April Fools day to tell him.  This seemed to convince him, with the help of Krista we completed the sale of the story and launched into a discussion of what she should name the new sibling.  We knew we’d done it when he called mom to suggest a name and I heard him say “I know now that it’s not an April Fool”

As Isaac said the evening family prayer tonight he said “thank thee for joking Uncle Bryan” and “thank thee for the next joke on Uncle Bryan.”  Their last joke of the day was to say good morning to him as they went to bed.

**Follow-up:  We also sent him a fake email from the producers of Smallville claiming that he could win a trip to the set of Smallville by answering trivia questions.  I guess he got his hopes up because he was still mad at us about that one the next day!