Fooled Ya!

3rd grade Switcheroo

Notice the sock-awesomeness. Courtesy of my mother's ingenuity.

We only had one pair of each color. Hence, the solution.

April Fool's was always exciting. Not only did we have to check the toilets for Seran wrap before doing our business, but we also had to strategically practice, plan, and place our every-school-day move on the other until we reached perfection. Anything less would result in capture and defeat. For April Fool's Days brought opportunities of class room infiltration and identical twin occupation.

1989 was the first Switcheroo. I remember being terribly nervous with excitement as I marched into Tara's homeroom and did my best to hide my face from Mrs. Seacat for as long as possible. Flying under the radar was the surest way to make it through the day. Just before lunch I heared a commotion from across the hall as my 3rd grade teacher Ms. Pew entered the room with Tara in tow and exclaimed, "I think you have one of my students!". We were caught.

And so began our yearly escapades of April Foolishness.

4th Grade, the children in Tara's class found the switch so comical that as soon as Mrs. Donkersley entered the room, bursts of laughter bounced off the walls and she was so confused by them that she asked if she had put her makeup on wrong or if her clothes were inside out. Needless to say, with classmates blowing our cover that quickly, our day in the other's shoes did not last long.

We must have done a good job in 5th grade because we made it all the way through our Advanced Reading class where I remember the next day our Teacher getting terribly upset at us for cheating by taking a test for the other. Why she couldn't just switch the names on the top and call it good, still beats me.

Junior High and High School became less tricky because we only had one hour to spend with each teacher and usually coasted through those classes with ease. The planning, of course, became more intense as we had to map out and describe where in each class the other sat, who their friends were, and what little idiosyncrasies we needed to incorporate into our classroom routine. Those were fun planning sessions. And they must have paid off, because I don't remember ever having to switch back all those latter years. That's not to say we didn't get caught, but teachers are good sports and April Fool's is a day for breaking rules.

Enter 2004 when I worked at the Court house as a sworn-in deputy court clerk. It took some talking into, but Tara finally agreed to a good old-fashioned switcheroo. Try training someone on a new job away from the facility and equipment, with different passwords for every procedure, in a very small amount of time. She took a lot of notes. I worked at the front counter, so she had to take and tender money and answer "criminal's" questions and provide lots of information. We prayed for a slow afternoon. I let my front counter counterpart in on the secret though so she could cover for Tara as much as possible and try to draw traffic to her side of the window if necessary. Then I left for my break. I let Tara into the secured back door and I sat anxiously on the back steps where I would be undetected while she performed. It was only about 20 minutes later when all of my coworkers came to the back full of laughs and grins. One by one, they had each slowly realized the differences in my demeanor and figured the joke out. Then they sent

Tara to deliver something into the back office where she came face to face with the boss. Once so many are in on the secret though, it only takes a quizzical raise of an eyebrow to send the rest into spurts of laughter and the gig is up. I was a little worried about breaking the rules inside a courthouse, but I had an awesome boss, and she got a great kick out of it. Phew!

That was the last of our switching Era. Perhaps one of these days we'll try pulling one over on our kids or spouses.

Now that would be something to talk about.

Could not get this darn pic off my phone,

so here's a terrible pic of an actually decent pic

taken March 25th during an awesome shopping spree Tara won.

I'm the one on the left.

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April Fool's!!