April fools plus a week and two days.

I remember when I was about 6 years old, I used to love trying to trick my parents. One time, I pried a diamante out of the bow on my favourite shoes and tried to deceive my mum into thinking that it was a real diamond. Unfortunately I didn't do a very good job of scratching off all of the metallic paint on the underside of the diamante and so my mum wasn't fooled. Essentially, I just wrecked my own shoes. My favourite ones too.

There was another time I tried to fool my mum and it actually worked. Let me set the scene. It was like any other weekday evening. My mum was watching TV with my brother and force-feeding him the fruit she was peeling. She doesn't do that anymore and consequently, my brother's diet makes me question whether he has experienced a bowel movement since 1994. Anyway, as we were eating our apple and watching whatever it was we were watching, I had come to the conclusion that I needed to wee-wee (yes, I actually called it that). And so I skipped jauntily along to the bathroom. It probably wasn't a good idea with a full bladder but I was never a bright kid anyway. I'm getting very far off-track. How very unlike me. Did you know that Judge Judy isn't really a judge at all? I guess that means she's just a horrible old lady with an equally (if not moreso) horrible perm.

Back to my anecdote. Nam in bathroom. Nam peed. Nam has idea. - I thought it would be really clever to use shaving cream all over my face as if I were going to shave, you know, like Dad. Despite being dumb, I was able to recognise that putting a razor to my face wasn't the best thing to do. Nah, I probably just couldn't reach it. Thank goodness. I used my toothbrush instead, to wipe off some parts of the shaving cream, exposing neat patches of skin. I looked proudly into the mirror. "Mum is going to be so confused!" I chortled and ran out to the living room. "LOOK, MUM! I shaved my face!"

... I got yelled at so much. My awesome joke backfired and my mum made me swear to her that I did not really shave my face.

It was difficult to trick my dad. He was always tricking me. He also used to peel kiwis so that they looked like they had dreadlocks and then carve faces into their flesh. Totally peeled fruit better than my mum (sorry, Mum).

This time I was trying to mimic the way my mum checked the ripeness of fruit at the fruit markets. I approached our fruit bowl as if I were a shopper at the market perusing the vast display of fruits (in the bowl of what.. 5 fruits? Such a dumb kid). Today, Imaginary Cooking-and-Cleaning-Motherly-Nam was going to prepare a scrumptious feast of avocado for her children's lunch. I picked up the avocado and turned it in my hands, like Mum did. It looked good but I thought I'd better check how ripe it was. I gave it a gentle squeeze to check its firmness. Except my grip was stronger than I anticipated. Yellow and green lumpy paste erupted from the broken skin of the fruit, much like a freshly popped pimple, oozing pus. Panicking, I wrapped the avocado in a few tissues (as if that would somehow disguise the avocado amongst the other fruits), put it back into the bowl and abandoned my imaginary grocery trip.

When Dad asked who squashed an avocado and then tried to conceal it, I pretended not to know anything about it. Fooled ya, Daddio!

I am still just as deceptive and menacing. Impressive, I know.