April Fool's Day Lockup

Fools 2009

It was one of those days here in Northern CA that we love to brag about; sunny, warm and April 1st - take that you relatives back east! My husband and I, business partners in a film and video production company, decided to take an hour off ( the upside of a home based business, the downside being the opportunity to work all the time), and take our kids for a swim at the pool in our condo development.

We had three children in a little over a year and a half. When our daughter was a year old, I was happily pregnant again - this time with girl and boy twins. Now 8 and 9 1/2, the family pace was pretty hectic and anything but dull.

Within minutes of jumping in, our son had (1) managed to find a pair of handcuffs lying on the bottom of the pool, (2) surmised this to be the greatest April Fool's Day discovery in the history of his world, (3) grab the arm of each of his sisters and locked them together, one facing in each direction, as he shouted " You two are locked together forever."

April Fool! And then getting the exact degree of shock he wanted, he went to push the unlock button. But they didn't unlock. The handcuffs were locked tightly and wouldn't budge. My husband tried all sorts of gyrations, then headed back to the house and returned with a tool kit, to no avail. The girls were getting cold by now and were trying hard to be brave, augmenting fear with death threats to their brother, now really feeling the consequence of his 8 year old spontaneity. 

It was hard to get the girls into our minivan, what with one being faced forward and the other backward (or vice versa), but we finally did it and the five of us headed to the locksmith in town - first time for me; I didn't even know they existed. He knew right away that these were kids' handcuffs, made to be "authentic" and in that dangerous fashion, unable to be opened without the key. It took two hours for this dear man to create a key to finally open the lock, as the five of us wet, grumpy, frustrated and fearful, breathed down his neck. He kept those handcuffs so he could converse with the manufacturer and the proper government agency to get them recalled, which is a very good thing, so that neither sister would find it in her heart to attempt a little reciprocity in the middle of the night!

Since that day, April Fool's Day pranks are verboten in our house.