April Fools

One year for April Fools Day, my older siblings came up with a brilliant trick to play on my father, the best April Fools Day trick to date from the Smith household.  

We had (and still have) a marble bust of a young girl, that looks exactly like my sister Jean when she was little, and is there for called The Jean Statue in my family.  My dad of course loved the Jean Statue, (and still does).  The plan was to make it look like my brother Teddy had knocked the statue down and broke it.  Concocting a home-made plaster of paris, mixing water and flour, they had a white clay like substance that they could manipulate.  Now the next few steps were set up to take place right around the time my dad would come home from work.  They very very carefully placed the statue on the floor, with Jean's face down.  They then put the flour pieces around in a couple broken chunks.  The next step, was to all wait in place.  When my dad came home, after a strategically planned amount of time, they somehow made a big crash in the other room while Teddy stood close to the face down bust.  There were gasps and whispers, trying to act as if they were just as surprised as my dad was about to be, when he came sprinting to the noise.  Now, this next part happened very quickly: It seemed like it was one fluid motion of my dad entering the room and seeing the scene to when he had Teddy across his knee bum up, with his hand above his head moving in a downward motion towards Teddy - when everyone called out and grabbed his hand, trying to prevent innocent Teddy from actually getting spanked!  They successfully stopped my dad, and it took some time to show and explain that the statue was fine, it was a joke, April Fools!  And Teddy didn't even flinch through the whole performance.  He was ready to take that spank for the sake of the trick.  My dad was quickly relieved.

If I was alive I was not old enough to be involved or even remember, but this story has been told many times since.  My dad tells it with pride at the cleverness of his children.