Let me be the first to say I love April Fool’s Day. It has always been a day of puns, pranks and laughter in my family. I am especially excited for this one as my 10-year-old brother is finally old enough to be the victim of the year, and my 1-year-old daughter gets to see what it’s all about. Our tradition includes rigging up pranks in almost every room of the house and just waiting to hear a frustrated yell when our victim has fallen into the trap. 

I also love seeing how companies release their gag advertisements like last year when Netflix made every movie category about John Stamos. I really enjoyed watching movies from “New Releases Which Suffer From A Distinct Lack of Stamos,” one of many categories that spawned from this glorious prank. Redbox’s mood-match prank advertised that the machines now give you the option of putting your hand on the screen and having it “detect” what movie you are in the mood for. They had more than a few complaints as people did not understand why their local box didn’t offer mood-matching technology. It was ridiculously funny.

I myself have doled out some great pranks over the years. From wrapping my ex-roommate’s phone in rubber bands and watching her try to figure out why she had a giant ringing rubber band ball on her nightstand to covering my ex-boyfriend’s car, a 1964 Chevy Biscayne, in hundreds of post-it notes and watching him drive it to work. With the help of coworkers, we wrapped two of our supervisors’ cars in plastic wrap, a prank that gets increasingly harder to remove when the temperature is high. All in all, I’ve had some successes and some failures over the years, but I try to keep them as harmless and goofy as possible.

But let’s get serious. This trend of pregnancy announcements as April Fool’s jokes is lame. Pregnancy announcements are not a joke. Have you ever been pregnant? It’s nine months of mood swings, aches and peeing yourself. I was kind of lucky to be surprisingly fertile and get pregnant with no intention or struggle. Many women are not so lucky. According to the Hope Xchange,  one in four women will experience a miscarriage in their lifetime. We share a lot of good news on social media. My time line is almost always filled with engagement announcements, happy family photos and travel pictures. What we don’t see is the pain. The pain of losing a wanted baby shakes you to the core, and it’s insensitive to joke about your mythical bundle of joy while someone is bawling their eyes out at the loss of their own. 

One of the many glorious achievements of the Internet is that new content is just a click away. Feeling uninspired? Want to really prank them good? Type your heart’s desire into that search bar and click through all 30 pages of that Buzzfeed article to find that awesome prank you’ve waited all your life to utilize. No need to make anyone ugly cry because you can’t show a little compassion for the struggles of a woman mourning a loss.

Keep the jokes classy and the pranks clean. You’ll be sure to have all your victims peeing themselves laughing, pregnant or not.