Oh What a Wicked Web we Weave ...

Pranks were well worth the punishment ...

About six months ago, I wrote about a prank my sister and I pulled on our younger brothers. Sadly (or not) it backfired on us big time. Well, this is another prank Claudia and I pulled on the same two brothers, Tim and Chip. It was quite elaborate.

One of us, I can’t remember who, (although Claudia says it was me), thought it would be fun to spider-web Tim and Chip’s bedroom while they slept. Then we would come up with some form of an alarm to wake them and then watch them get tangled in our ‘web’.

I may not remember whose idea it was, but I do remember how the spider-web idea was hatched. Claudia and I came across a couple of balls of white crochet thread Grandma left behind after she crocheted a few delicate snowflakes for our Christmas tree.

The crochet thread was very thin, almost like the silken threads in a spider’s web. From that, the prank took root and blossomed.

We waited until our brothers were asleep. Then armed with our balls of crochet thread, we locked and loaded and tip-toed into their room.

Each of us had a plan. We started tying threads from one side of the room to the other: from a dresser handle to the closet doorknob, winding around the window lock, across the room to the other window lock, to a bedpost, then the other dresser handle across the room, another bedpost, and the closet doorknob again. Back and forth we crisscrossed our web.

There was only one problem —but it was something major we had overlooked. How were we going to get out of their room when the web was finished?

Any way we turned we met with crisscrossed web threads. We got so tangled in our own web, we started to giggle. Then we sat down on the floor, laughing at our stupid oversight —-we were trapped inside our own prank!

It wasn’t too long before Tim and Chip woke up, wondering why we were in their room and what was so doggone funny. The dim light from the hallway created a weird scene: their two older sisters sitting on the floor on opposite sides of the room, laughing their heads off —and not moving.

“Get out of here! We want to sleep!”

“Tim, that’s what’s so funny! We can’t GET out ...”

Tim got out of bed, intending to cross the room to the light switch by the bedroom door. He immediately got caught in the web with us.

“Aaaaaaa! What IS that? What did you guys DO?”

Then Chip hopped out of bed and got caught in the web, too, arms flailing in every direction. We knew the jig was up when Chip screamed like a girl in a monster movie and Mama and Daddy came running up the stairs.

Claudia and I got grounded. No TV for two weeks, plus we had to clean up the spider web mess. I wish I could say that cured us of pranking, but I can’t say it did. Some things are just way too much fun …

But truth be known, that’s the primary reason I became a writer and a children’s poet. My wild imagination and orneriness gets well rewarded on paper -–just not so much in real life where our pranks most often backfired and we got in trouble ...

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