April Fool's Day 2014

One of my main goals as a mother is to take every opportunity to make our children's lives magical. I try to make every holiday special and to make new traditions with our family as often as possible. And a small and silly holiday like April Fool's Day is no exception! Though, instead of playing mean pranks, we use this day as an opportunity to teach our girls how to play funny jokes on others, and that as long as BOTH sides think it is funny, then it is okay. We definitely want our kids to have a sense of humor, but not at the expense of others' feelings.

 We started off our day eating cereal with colored milk (the girls thought this was AMAZING) out of sand pails and shovels (which had been washed out first).

And for lunch we ate our food using their play kitchen dishes. They thought this was so funny and probably ate better than they have for lunch in a loooong time because they were so happy!

When Daddy came home from school, we had a couple of funny jokes ready for him. First, the girls colored some saran wrap with markers and we taped it to the front of the TV. As soon as Daddy walked in the front door, they started pretending to be sad, and that the had done something that they weren't supposed to, and showed Daddy the TV. Kyle pretended to be super surprised at what they had done, and they were so excited to tell him that they hadn't actually colored the TV, but they had played a trick on him! It was super funny and cute.

Then we used clear plastic pony beads and melted them in square molds (as seen here) in the oven and put them in a glass cup with warm water (they looked just like ice cubes, except that they didn't float), sprayed the outside of the glass with water so it looked like it was covered in condensation, and offered Daddy a cold drink of water. Boy, was he surprised when his water wasn't cold, but warm! He obviously knew something was up when we offered it to him, but he honestly had no idea that we had made the fake ice cubes. The girls thought it was SO funny. 

Did you get to play any funny jokes on anyone this year? We had so much fun together this year, and I already have more ideas planned for next year- I am so excited for the kids to all get older and for these silly April Fool's traditions of ours to grow, too!