How to get your nephew a BB gun with no headached from Mom.

The first step is to tip the youngster off and give him the score. You are going to give him two choices and he is to take the BB gun.

The next step is really quite simple if there is someone in the area that sells pony rides to little kids. You beg, borrow or otherwise get your hands on a pony. You leave the BB gun in it's original packing.

On his birthday you crash the party by simply walking in while leading the pony and carrying the BB gun. You announce that your favorite nephew can have his choice. He can either have the pony or the BB gun. 

Of course, Mom will snatch the BB gun out of your hands, and give it to her son and tell you to gt that damned pony out of her house immediately. She will be so grateful to get the pony out of the house whe will forget entirely that she has just handed her son an evil Daisy Red Ryer BB gun.

Even though you will get your ears beaten to death about the pony for the next 25 years you will never hear a word about the BB gun if you got the pony out of here house quickly.  Don't worry about this. For the first couple of years the pony will be a sore subject but over time things will change. It will eventually become another piece of hilarious family lore.

That's how I got my first BB gun and I never anyone know Uncle Mike and I had that one planned out weeks in advanced.

I remember finally letting the cat out of the bag maybe forty years later at one of the last Thanksgivings I ever spent with my mother before she passed. Uncle Mike had been dead and gone for years.

Mom brought up the story while we were sitting in front of the fireplace just before dinner. Whe whole family laughed themselves silly picturing my mother as a younger woman raising five kids and having to deal with a pony in the living room at her oldest son's birthday.

I told her about Uncle Mike and I having planned the event a couple of months in advanced. I really wanted that BB gun. I was afraid my mom would not let me have it. Uncle Mike told me to let him do the thinking.

Mom's jaw dropped and she fell into laughter realizing all this time after the fact that she had been fooled. 

Then Mom asked if my father had been involved.

I explained to her that Uncle Mike and I told him about the plan. When he stopped laughing he looked at us and said we were on our own because he wasn't touching that one with a ten-foot pole!