April Fools' Day Fun

April 1st is Backwards Day at our house. We take the traditional meal order and change it around. This year, Mimi and Ba decided to take the opportunity to play with our food. So, all the food presented at mealtimes was made from candy or had candy as an ingredient.

Our first meal was desert. It helps to wake up and the day started with a nice helping of dirt (cake) complete with (gummy) worms.


And if you have dirt for breakfast, you have to eat it without benefit of utensils.


After that we ate our dinner. Ba and Mimi love sushi, so we made some for lunch. We invited Ethan and Ryan to come sample our Japanese restaurant. This one fooled them for a second to two, but they soon realized the sushi was krispie treats, gummies, and fruit roll-ups.




Breakfast also required candle light. Ryan really enjoyed that part of lunch, even if he only liked the krispie treat part of the sushi.


The eggs were fluff and lemon jell-o and there was grill cheese sandwiches made from pound cake toast with yellow-colored icing as cheese and laffy-taffy flattened out and rounded into a tomato slice. The mango juice was colored milk. This one didn't fool them at all. We thought they would really like the fluff, but neither of them could stand it. They immediately asked for real eggs instead. Ethan said, "If I eat one more bite of candy I'll barf." Can't have that on a holiday! So we had real eggs for breakfast with real OJ and mango-colored milk chasers.

All this talk of eggs brings me to another egg look alike from the day. During his bath, Ryan asked for a balloon to fill with water. He filled this so full, we couldn't lift it out of the water. Sitting there, in the soapy water, it looks like, well, like an egg.


Such is life on backward day. Nothing is what it seems.

In Other News

After the hurricane, I really wanted a phone. A phone with a cord that attached to the wall of a house that we owned. I wanted a number that said "This is where we live." I wanted an area code that didn't fritz out because the lines were all wonky because the water screwed up everything including the towers that beamed the transmissions into outer space. When we bought this house, I got just that. I got 203-535-0014. It was good. It was comforting. It attached to a wall and had 3 extensions.

It also has a ghost. Her name is Dawn Ricatelli. The phone almost never brought calls from friends, like the one in New Orleans. It brought mostly mechanical voices saying "This is for [pause] Dawn Ricatelli." Sometimes it brought an old woman's voice saying, "Dawnie? Dawnie pick up it's me! Are you there? Call me." I called the voice once, but she wouldn't talk to me. "Stop calling. I don't know you." Or she would whistle. She has a loud piercing whistle. I stopped trying to tell her that Dawn wasn't at this number anymore. I tried to tell her it was just a number to a house with some people she didn't know. It didn't work. Dawn owes a lot of people money. The ghost in the phone number doesn't seem to care. She lets the phone ring and waits for me or the answering machine to handle things for her.

The phone also has a price tag. In this case it costs about $50.00 a month. I am tired of paying money to AT&T. I want $50.00 for movies and books and fun things, so today, I sent Dawn and the number away. Now, I just have a cell phone. It still has a 504 area code. It says, "You are from New Orleans. You are carrying a piece of the past and can use it talk to the future." That's a pretty cool idea. It also says, "You are hip and cutting edge. You are in the 21st century." That's pretty cool, too. Still, it's strange not to have a land line. It's odd to know that no one can call when I'm not home, and wait for the beep, and leave a message for me to find at some future date. Now if they get a message, it's because I haven't charged my cell phone or haven't answered it, or am driving, or ignoring it. Overall though, it means I am free of the ghost of today and can rely on older ghosts which have proven themselves come hell or high water.