April Fools Day may be one of the kids favorite holidays. I usually try to do some fun and special food items to celebrate - but this day we had planned to go to the Manti Temple Open House together. I knew it wouldn't be a normal April Fools Day (food-wise), but we still managed to pull together a fun breakfast of "Spaghetti and Meatballs".
Honestly, I'm SUPER proud of these. They are strips of pancake with homemade berry syrup and chocolate pieces for meatballs, served with goblets of sparkling apple juice. It was cute and fun and de-licious.
I've said this before - but my mom was so good at doing simple things and making it feel magical. I aim for that same balance all the time. This did NOT take much longer than making regular pancakes. There are no Pinterest worthy placecards or fancy decorations, but the kids were surprised and happy and it made for a little bit of childhood magic that will hopefully pay in memory dividends as they grow.
April Fool's Day has turned into a full holiday and my kids were very excited to celebrate this year. However, it fell on General Conference this year and with all of the other traditions we do with that (which is also a full holiday in it's own right), I decided to do it a little differently and scale back a little. Austin was worried, but I think they all had a great time.
For breakfast we had our traditional cinnamon rolls, but I printed out sheets of jokes for everyone to share and laugh over while we ate. (Amy stayed with us and it made it that much better!)
Lunch we had "Corn Dogs and Spaghetti and Meatballs" which was simply hot dogs with canned corn on the side, with leftover spaghetti and grapes (after I realized that the grapes looked kind of like meatballs). I think that Austin was really tricked by the grape meatballs at first and I will take that as a win.
For dinner we decided to do a "Mystery Cafe" where we assigned silly names to the food we had for dinner: appetizer, entree, and dessert - then had the kids pick what they wanted from that menu. Some kids came out with otter pops and whipped cream for their appetizer, and were eating corn for dessert but it was a huge hit. A fun mix up from our traditional "April Fools Day" cusine.
But the REAL April Fool's Trick was that this is what our house looked like on April 1 - and then THIS is what it looked like two days later - a massive three day blizzard that was supposed to drop 18" of snow over the course of the storm. It still totally feels like winter, but we keep hoping that Spring is around the corner!
Remember when it was St. Patricks Day and I wrote about how I try to approach holidays with a "simple and fun" attitude? You know... with a heavy dose of simple and just enough fun to add to the magic of childhood. Well April Fools is a favorite holiday, and I feel like it's escalating quickly because the kids have high expectations. It's turned into a "fun food" holiday, where each meal has something fun or "tricky" about it. Also, we love celebrating this with the Haderlies! 1- they make everything more fun and 2- then Jenna and I can share the "creative food" efforts
Our menu this year:
Breakfast- Eggs and Toast (yogurt, apricot half, grilled pound cake)
Lunch- Green Smoothies and Pretzels (I had them make a smoothie and then teased them that I was going to put spinach in it, and then I DID put spinach in it and they were appropriately horrified.)
Dinner - Mini Chicken Pot Pies with a dessert of Chicken NOT Pies (pudding & candy shaped like peas and carrots in a dessert shell)
We haven't ever really done any pranks for the holiday, but this year - at about midnight the night before we decided to pull out the Christmas Tree and threw a couple of toys up for "decoration". We turned on Christmas music when the kids came downstairs and wished them all a Merry Christmas! It turned out to be a pretty good joke, although Austin did NOT appreciate it.
We played one more "prank" by telling the Haderlies that they had to go home, packing their car up and waving goodbye to them. Then I told the kids I had to run an errand and needed them to come with me. We drove to the butterfly museum and the Haderlies were waiting to surprise us right inside the door.
My last prank was for David. He has a coworker who recently bought a hairless cat from Russia and it's been a saga of an experience. (including smuggling the cat over the border) They are planning to take professional pictures of their cat and in my note I joked about starting a hairless cat photography business. I hung the picture by his bed and thought I was pretty hilarious. He said that he couldn't sleep with that picture next to his bed (a copy of a $400 painting "Hairless Cat with Butterflies").
All in all a pretty good April Fools. A little more emphasis on the fun magic side than the simple side this year, but that's okay. Happy April Fools!
April Fools is one of my kids very favorite holidays. Truth be told, they think the holiday is a day of eating funny foods - and that's the one thing that we are good at. It's just funny and a lighthearted day. I wasn't feeling up to much this year, but my mom invited Jenna and I to come up and spend the day in Morgan. My mom did breakfast and Jenna hit it out of the park with snack and lunch. I was so grateful for both my mom and Jenna. Here was our menu for the day:
Breakfast: Eggs (yogurt and peach halves) and Sausage (brown scrambled eggs)
Snack: A box of donuts (yay! donuts for snack!) filled with fruits and veggies (which the kids ate just as happily and probably better than they would have eaten donuts)
Lunch: Spaghetti and Meatballs (cake with noodle frosting, brownie meatballs, and jam sauce). Jenna also made real spaghetti and meatballs to eat for lunch and we ate the cake right after.
Dinner:
So here's the deal. I was tired. My kids had already been spoiled by all the fun April First foods in Morgan, but we had to come home to Lehi for dinner. I didn't really want to do anything else. The kids were all but demanding a special dinner. I told them that we weren't going to do anything special for dinner, that we'd done all of our fun foods for the day. Then at dinner time, I told them that we were having Italian for our meal. I set the table with dried pasta and raisins while Austin railed on and on about how "No! It's April Fool's Day! We SHOULD have something fun for dinner." I just kept calmly repeating that it was going to have to be a regular meal and that we could be grateful for such fun food earlier in the day.
Part of me was cringing at the entitlement that I could hear lacing the words- but the other part of me was just laughing because clearly, it's not "regular" for us to eat dried pasta. As we started our meal, I told them that it was a new italian dish that i'd been wanting to try the recipe for and I wanted them all to try it. They sat there crunching their dry pasta (and not even complaining as much as they do at some of our real dinners). Austin was particularly upset, NOT about the dried pasta, but about the lack of an April Fool.
Lydia finally said that she didn't really love it (after several whole minutes of crunching the pasta). David said "Oh! The parmesan cheese! We forgot the parmesan cheese in the car from when I went to the store earlier" He walked out to the car and came back in with Pizza Hut Pizza. It was an epic APRIL FOOLS! I'm still amused about it.
I'm not one for over-celebrating holidays, but I have some very cherished childhood memories of April Fool's Day. My parents did an incredible job of keeping things simple, but fun and memorable with pretty much every holiday and I want to keep those same traditions alive (especially the "making things special without going over the top part).
Some of my favorite April Fools memories are:
-Putting a rubber band around the sink sprayer in the kitchen so that if someone turned the water on they would get sprayed. (ha!)
-My mom making funny food for us, like peanut-butter covered bananas that she said were hotdogs and yogurt with peach halves that she said were fried eggs.
-Filling my dad's shower with all of our stuffed animals and thinking we were SO funny.
This year I decided to do just a few food-tricks, because I mean... I had to feed my children anyway so I may as well just do a few little things to make it special. I didn't realize how much Lydia was going to LOVE it though. But she did, she loved it! She's at the perfect age for things like this because she's young enough to still get a little tricked, but old enough that she gets that it's a joke and she can appreciate it.
Our food menu for the day:
Breakfast- "Eggs and Sausage" (Vanilla yogurt with a peach half, and... sausage.)
Lunch- Octopus and juice. (Hot dog on top of pasta, and jello in a cup.)
Dinner- Donuts and Trees. (Bagel thin sandwich with sprinkles, and broccoli.)
I asked Lydia about our April Fools Day food and she said: "Funny that you tricked me on every one!" She said she liked the breakfast one best because "it had sausage and a peach!" but I think that she really liked the octopus for lunch the very best. She looooved it.
I love that I have the time and the means to do simple little things like this to make my kids feel special and hopefully fill their childhood with happy feelings. (There were plenty of times today that there were tantrums, and I wasn't as patient as I wish I had been and I hope that they don't remember those things, but rather they remember things like this and know how much I loved them.)
