Last year, April Fool’s Day came around when we were just at the beginning of a pandemic that was lasting longer than we’d originally thought it would. Planning a bit of harmless family fun was as much for me as it was for the kids — we needed something exciting to break up the long days of quarantine with no end in sight. So we decided to take April Fool’s Day and run with it… and it’s one of the best things we’ve ever done together!

I’ve gathered together all of the silly little pranks we played on the kids last year in case you’d like to do something similar with your family! None of these pranks are scary, so they can be used with children of all ages.

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We wanted to make sure they knew something strange was happening as soon as they woke up, so we began by booby-trapping the upstairs hallways. We taped streamers across their doorframes so they’d have to crawl out and filled the upstairs hallway with every balloon we had — this year we’ll plan ahead and definitely have more!

I also started the day with my clothes on backwards! This one was kind of disappointing — they didn’t even notice! I finally asked if they thought anything was strange about my clothes, which is when they saw it. I’ll probably try it again this year but make it more obvious somehow.

We also used window markers to draw on the mirror that they use for brushing teeth! We drew an astronaut helmet so it looked like they were astronauts when they stood there.

This prank was my favorite! We took photos of ourselves making shocked faces, then printed them out in a large size and taped them to random places. Every time they opened the fridge door, I was there to greet them!

We also added Googley eyes to the fruit in their drawer in the fridge. We used edible Googley eyes and stuck them on with icing.

The girls have their own milk pitchers so they can serve themselves, so we put food coloring in them to change the color of their milk! So simple, but they’re STILL talking about this prank almost a year later.

I guess a lot of our pranks involved food! At dinner time, I served their food (fried rice) in cups and put their milk to drink in bowls.

I don’t have pictures of every single prank we did, but we also switched the places of a lot of things in the house. You can see in the back of the above photo that my purse is hanging on the hook where Lila’s backpack usually went, and her backpack was on the shelf where I usually keep my purse. We also switched the chairs and place settings at the table and a few other things here and there around the house.

The girls enjoyed our April Fool’s Day pranks so much that they demanded that we do it every year, so let me know if you have any good ideas to switch things up a bit!