April Fools' Meta-Post

Today, as you may know, is April Fools’ Day. And each year in this space I’ve come up with some gag post, which is often a lot of fun (for me, anyway). But this year we’ve been traveling a bunch—I’m in St. Louis right now, as it happens—and so your day is safe from bloggy hijinks, at least here.

So instead, I figured I’d simply relive the glory of days gone by.

Two years ago, while Sarah was pregnant, I announced that “Peanut” was actually two babies, not one (a boy and a girl!). One friend went for it hook, line, and sinker. She approached Sarah in the library that afternoon and earnestly said, “I thought you looked big, but I didn’t want to say anything.”
And of course I got in trouble for that.

Last year, as we were going through the process of applying for jobs the first time, it seemed appropriate to tell people about our “postdocs” at a research institute in Amsterdam. No one, it seemed, followed the link I provided for the “Grasmaand Dwaas Institute for the Humanities.” If one had, he would have discovered that “Grasmaand Dwaas” is a very rough and very literal translation of “April Fools’ Day” into Dutch. The implausibility of two American historians taking their infant son to do research in the Netherlands didn’t stop at least one person from offering to come with us to babysit.

So, I’m sorry to disappoint if you were hoping to click onto the Peanut Chronicle this morning and find out what I was going to get in trouble for this year. But the best I could come up with was that Nicholas was named after some famous Nicholas in history or literature. And it just wasn’t funny. French President Nicolas Sarkozy? I mean, French jokes are so clichéd, and then I’d have to explain the “h.” Nicholas Nickleby? Well, I’ve (rather famously) not read much Dickens, so that wouldn’t be a very good post. Nicholas Biddle, the President of the Bank of the United States? I’ve already made pretty certain with my long-winded self-referential posts. St. Nicholas? Well, Grandma Alice still may think that we named her grandson after Santa Claus, but no dice.

Maybe next year.  Happy April Fools’ Day!