It is late April, and our family is passing time on a Wednesday night. Mom is flipping through a book entitled “Fun Recipes for the Family.” Dad is perusing the classified ads in the newspaper. Yard sale season has started and, well, you just never know what you might find. Ashley is doing the Hidden Pictures puzzle in a Highlights magazine, and Erin and Tammy are playing a game of electronic Stratego.
Erin is closing in on Tammy’s flag. She used a few of her turns to “probe”
an area where she felt it was likely to be hidden. After getting a “one beep”
response to her last probe she is fairly certain of its exact location . . . and she moves in for the capture. Tammy is no amateur at Stratego, and she holds a “poker face” . . . giving no clue as to the accuracy of her sister’s assumptions.
Erin moves onto a vacated spot when, uh oh, the explosion noise sounds off. Erin has stepped on a bomb! She has been sandbagged! But wait. After the explosion noise there is the victory tune. Erin is using her number eight guy, the miner, to advance and he is impervious to bombs. And so, not only is he safe, but Tammy now has to remove that bomb from the playing board . . . and she does.
Meanwhile Dad is zipping from one yard sale ad to the next when something catches his eye. He stops, and his mind starts “cranking.” And then . . . a bell goes off in his head. The girls and Mom like Dad’s ideas.
They’re usually good ones. And they have learned to recognize them . . . at their inception. They all look his way.
“Could this be it?” Dad thinks to himself “Could this be . . . the perfect prank?” He shows everybody the ad and explains what he thinks they can do. He doesn’t sugarcoat it. It would be a serious undertaking, that much is certain, but if they could pull it off . . . wow!
The girls think it’s a great idea. Children, in their innocence and naïveness, charge ahead no matter what the challenge. Parents, as we know, are more circumspect, and Mom and Dad consider the whole picture. There is a threshold to cross, and, once crossed, it cannot be gone back over. Then, it is decided. They will do it . . . together.