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Dear parents: Easter falls on April 1 this year. April Fools' Day. We simply can't let this opportunity pass. The first one to make the kids cry wins.
Here are five ways to prank your kids on Easter Fools Day.
1. Lousy Easter eggs: Stuff those plastic Easter eggs with broccoli, beans (not jelly beans) and carrot coins and explain that's what the Easter Bunny likes to eat.
2. Lousy baskets: Decorate their Easter baskets and stock them with real grass, boxes of Band-aids, macaroni and cheese, pencils and sharpeners, laundry soap, toothpaste, vitamins. Call it ABC, baby, Anything But Candy. Make a big show of raving about the great stuff the Easter Bunny left them. "Look, it's gluten-free dude!"
3. Hunt high and low: Announce it's time for the big Easter egg hunt. Tell them there are hundreds of eggs in the back yard. Ready? Let's go! Turns out there are no eggs at all. If you are really evil, make it a scavenger hunt with clues that are impossible to figure out. Or be less evil and give them a fighting chance, but make it harder by leaving out a GPS tracker instead of baskets with a note: "Your baskets are somewhere in the neighborhood."
4. Fun with hot sauce: The pointy spout of a Sriracha bottle is perfect for injecting a squirt of hot sauce in the middle of a Marshmallow Peep. Make some extra-devilish deviled eggs by using generous amounts of wasabi or horseradish in the filling. Or sprinkle cayenne pepper on them instead of paprika.
5. Fun with Easter eggs: Put candy inside plastic eggs, but use some Super Glue to seal the egg shut with the candy inside. You could put a dot of nail polish on a few eggs that aren't glued shut so you could easily open one and say, "What's wrong? These are easy to open. Try harder." Dye some hard-boiled Easter eggs, but set aside a few raw eggs to dye as well and wait for an unsuspecting egg lover to open the wrong one.
Don't fear the Peeper: Do you think your kids will hate you after you pull these tricks on them? Silly rabbit, they'll hate you eventually anyway. Might as well get a laugh out of it.
RELATED: Check our Easter page for egg hunts, services and recipes.
Contact Sharon Kennedy Wynne at swynne@tampabay.com. Follow @SharonKWn.
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