April Fool!!

If I had to choose one favorite day, it would be April Fool's day!!! As a kid, it was the one day everyone feared my existence. So here it was, March 31, 1967 - the doctor had said it would be "any day now" and I'm thinking, THIS IS IT!!!! The pains were getting closer: 10 minutes apart and I'm packing my suitcase, 8 minutes apart and I'm calling the doctor, 5 minutes apart and I'm calling my husband at work - we need to get to the hospital now!!!

The race was on. Maybe I could have this baby before midnight or maybe even hold off until April 2nd. But Chris had her own agenda and loudly made her entrance into the world at 8:00 am, April 1, 1967. It must have been the anesthesia because when the doctor told me I had a baby girl, I told him this was the first and last time someone had gotten the best of me on April Fool's Day!! Unfortunately for Chris, that was the last time she was able to get the better of me on my favorite day of the year!!!

Poor Chris never knew what to expect when her birthday rolled around. I'll admit to being pretty nasty at times and the older she got, the more hilarious the pranks. Like the year I frosted an upside-down cake pan - she blew out the candles and attempted to cut the cake while I left the room so she couldn't see me laughing (there was a real cake in the fridge). When her 16th birthday rolled around, Chris had been hinting that she wanted a car and she got one - unfortunately it was a matchbox car (the only kind she could drive without the license I wouldn't let her get)!!! On her 17th birthday Chris thought I had changed my mind. Her birthday card contained a car key - she flew out the door to check out all the vehicles on the street to see which one was her's!!! When she saw me doubled over with laughter, she knew I had gotten her again - the key belonged to a car a neighbor had junked years earlier!!!

Somehow Chris managed to get through those tough years as the oldest of 5 (and the hated babysitting!!!). The April Fool birthday jokes are a thing of the past although I may find a way to get her again someday (maybe when she turns 40?!). Chris is now married with 2 lovely children, Sarah (9) and Daniel (2) and lives in the Detroit area.